Saturday, June 20, 2009
LJ syndication
Just a quick note to say I've created a Degrassi Digest feed for Livejournal; it's available here.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
S01 E05 – The Great Race
The girls' locker room. On the PA, Mr Lawrence expositions that sports are "a big part of life" at Degrassi Junior High. Melanie's in her school swimsuit, staring at her own chest in the mirror. L.D. is watching and getting creeped out. "What are you doing?" she asks.
"Checking!" says Melanie brightly. "Checking?" asks L.D., who knows where this conversation is going and doesn't want to go there. And who could blame her?
"My mom won't let me get a bra. Which is really unfair, 'cause I need one. Don't you think?" asks Melanie. L.D. looks kind of panicked and mumbles something ineffective, but when Melanie gets mad, L.D. reluctantly agrees with her. "It's obvious!" insists Melanie. "I don't know what's wrong with my mom. Maybe she needs glasses or something?" L.D. politely resists the urge to point out that if your boobs can't be seen without glasses, they may not be all that big. The swimming coach comes in and calls the girls out. L.D. has to drag Melanie away from her fascinated contemplation of her own breasts. Opening credits.
So, there's a swimming pool, and people are swimming in it. People in swimming caps and goggles give me the creeps – they look like aliens. Anyway, Melanie is a fast swimmer, and they win because of her. This is Important to the Plot. Everyone jumps into the pool to celebrate. High-fives ensue.
Later, everyone's leaving Mr Raditch's classroom. Joey comes up to Steph, and breaks out a line he's obviously been working on all day: "Hey Stephanie, did you know I got an A+ in sex education last year? So if there's anything you want to know, Joey P. Jeremiah – P for Playboy – at your service." Thank GOD the P is for Playboy (and I'm pretty sure the uppercase P is appropriate here, as I think Joey has more experience of tacky "men's magazines" than of actual playboyism). Steph inexplicably continues to be entertained by Joey's flirting, and even feigns interest in the cutouts of "hot" '80s chicks and motorbikes pasted inside his locker. I never thought I'd say this, but Stephanie Kaye is aiming too low here.
L.D. runs up and tells Steph that the girls won their swimming race and are in the city finals of something unspecified. "Great," says Steph, with a spectacularly insincere toothy smile. L.D asks her to make an announcement about it, but Steph tells her that school presidents don't announce sports and to go see someone called Jason Cox. As so often happens to characters on this show, L.D. doesn't seem to realise she's being snubbed, and runs off to find Jason.
Close-up on the inside of Arthur's locker. We see a clumsily hand-drawn height chart with Arthur and Yick's heights marked. Arthur's replaced his owl poster with some horrifying photo of a sort of mummified face with lots of plaster of Paris melting off it, like if you were delirious from malaria and then took acid, you might have hallucinations of this sort of thing. There's also a really disturbing artist's reconstruction of a buck-toothed teenage Neanderthal, a poster of a slug, and another one called "Insects on Parade".
Yick and Arthur take turns standing up against the height chart, and both are pissed off to discover that they're still short, just like yesterday. They rail against cruel Fate for a bit, and just as they're going to leave, Snake (who's at least 6 feet tall) walks by. They both watch him like he is a man-god, come to earth just to make them look even shorter by comparison.
Melanie's getting books out of her locker when Snake the Man-God appears and goes to his locker, which is a couple feet away. Melanie blatantly ogles him, until he looks over at her and she turns away hastily. Scene from the credits! Snake totally noticed, though, and gives her an "Awww, cute" kind of smile. Which is not actually that encouraging, from her point of view.
Meanwhile, Mr Lawrence is on the PA again, and announces that the music club is looking for new members, and "new tuba players would be especially appreciated". Seriously, this is the weirdest running joke ever.
L.D comes over and teases Melanie about liking Snake. Melanie denies it unconvincingly. Random girls appear and congratulate them about the swimming thing. Did you know the girls are good at swimming? Pay attention.
A kid runs up to Doris the Secretary's desk, and he's got a football under his arm so you know he's Jason Cox, the sports guy Stephanie mentioned earlier. He tells Doris he needs to make an announcement on the PA. "Ok, just keep it brief. I've got a date!" says Doris, sounding all excited and squeeish. Awww. While Doris anxiously touches up her makeup (hee!), Jason announces that the boys have a soccer match that afternoon, and everyone should turn up to support them. No mention of the girls' swimming team. L.D. and Melanie hear him, and are filled with righteous feminist rage.
Outside the school, Arthur and Yick hide behind their stalking tree and spy on Snake. "How come he gets to be tall?" asks Yick resentfully. "I'm not sure," says Arthur, "but I read somewhere that you are what you eat. Maybe we should find out what he eats." Arthur needs to find some better reading material.
The boys are getting on with the important manly business of kicking a soccer ball at random, while some girls (who know their place) practice cheerleading. L.D. and Melanie march up to Jason and demand to talk to him. L.D. asks why he didn't make an announcement about the swimming team, and Jason says he didn't have time. L.D. correctly points out that this is a stupid excuse.
"Ladies, ladies," Jason begins. And nothing good ever started with that. "People don't care about girls' sports. Girls aren't good athletes." Smug nods from the soccer team. Indignation from L.D. and Melanie (and a collection of girls who've appeared out of nowhere). "Don't get mad at me," says Jason. "It's human nature, right?" "Ya, right on!" say the boys.
L.D. points out that the girls are actually good at swimming, while the boys lose all their matches. Jason has an answer: "We're unlucky, that's all. Anyway, soccer's tough. If you win, big deal. If we were swimming against a bunch of girls, we'd win too." The man knows how to work a crowd.
L.D. challenges the boys' soccer team to a swimming race against the girls. Jason looks around at the rest of his team. The other guys look nauseous, cough and stare at their shoes. "Ok!" says Jason. "We'll be there!" His undoubted talents obviously don't include reading body language. The boys then hurry off and get into a minivan, presumably to go to their doomed soccer game. Jason actually grabs the cheerleaders by the arms and shepherds them in too. What a gent.
Snake's been watching the whole argument, and now exchanges goofy grins with Melanie before cycling off.
The next scene opens with some tremendously blatant product placement: a very tight close-up of two McDonald's milkshakes being slurped tantalisingly (it's that old packaging where everything had rows of M's in regulation '80s shades of brown and yellow, which makes me feel both nostalgic and hungry). The camera pulls out to reveal that the delicious, delicious milkshakes are being drunk by L.D. and Melanie.
"What a sexist!" whines L.D. "He's just like my brothers. They think just because I'm a girl, I'm a second-class person. Well, we'll show Jason, right?" Melanie is entirely not listening, and wonders out loud if Snake just sees her as a kid "But who could blame him? It's my mum's fault. She thinks I'm still a little kid! I'm nearly a teenager. A passionate teenager whose dumb mom won't let her buy a bra."
L.D. listens open-mouthed to this baffling monologue, then stands up and drags Melanie down the road, announcing that they're going to go buy a bra. Off they go, with Melanie making shrieky noises of protest, watched by passerby Nancy, who seems to exist for the sole purpose of rolling her eyes at the crazy antics of the main characters.
More product placement! Closeup of a shiny Wonderbra sign in a department store, which lists (in French and English!) the range of bra types made by Wonderbra. We will also see large numbers of clearly branded Wonderbras on the shelves and a poster for something called the "Wonderbra support system". Wonderbra Wonderbra Wonderbra. This is shameless. On the other hand, the bras the girls look at are all horrible things so big they could qualify as nightdresses, and the underwear models on the posters are all suicidal-looking middle-aged bottle blondes, so this may not have actually done much for Wonderbra sales.
"I can't do this!" giggles Melanie. "Of course you can! Don't be so chicken!" L.D. tells her. Melanie utters yet another timeless nonsensical Melanie speech: "I am not chicken! Well, maybe a little bit, but not a lot, though, sort of like a chicken wing, without the legs, or breasts…" "Ha ha! Breasts!" says L.D., and they collapse (almost literally) into giggles. Hilarious.
"What'll I tell my mom?" asks Melanie. "She doesn't have to know," says L.D. "You can change at school like Stephanie!" "Oh, like Stephanie," says Melanie, in a valiant attempt at withering sarcasm. She clearly realises that taking Stephanie as a role model in any area of life is a recipe for disaster. Smart kid.
L.D. shoves a huge bra at Melanie, who looks terrified, and then takes another one and sticks it over Melanie's eyes like a blindfold, which is pretty weird, really, and Melanie looks like she doesn't know whether to be amused or to run screaming and just avoid the whole bra issue by getting a sex change.
Before Melanie can make any life-changing decisions, though, an old and for some reason English shop assistant whooshes up and asks if she can help them. "She wants to buy a bra," explains L.D. "Mmmm!" says the woman eagerly, which, girls, should be your cue to run. She makes a vague attempt to measure Melanie (i.e. wraps a measuring tape diagonally around her torso, so that it goes under one boob and over the other) and declares, "I think I know what you'd like." She yanks a random bra off the rack and holds it up reverently, murmuring, "It is lovely, isn't it?" like it's some kind of antique Chinese embroidery rather than a fugly nylon bra – but at least the Wonderbra marketing department are getting their money's worth. Melanie smiles politely and wonders if this woman is actually insane.
"Would you like to try it on?" asks the bra lady. "What? Here?" asks Melanie in disgust. "In the change rooms, dummy!" explains L.D. Aw man, do you remember when you were a kid and your mother would make you try stuff on behind a rack of clothes if there was a big queue for the changing rooms, and it was the most embarrassing thing ever? Or was that just my mother?
"You really should try it on," says the bra lady. "You can't bring it back." She is extraordinarily patient with these two, who are laughing so squeakily through all of this that I think they might be back on the New Zealand Zappers. Off they go to the changing rooms, where no doubt more bra-based hilarity ensues, but thankfully we're spared actually having to watch it.
Next morning, Stephanie is in the Bathroom of Skanky Transformations, putting blusher on her cheeks and also on her chin for some reason. L.D. is begging her to put in an appearance at the swimming race. "Do I get to make a speech?" asks Steph, in her flirty voice (I guess she's decided that it's easier to just leave it switched on all the time, or else that a bit of lesbian flirting will provide her with a much-needed change of pace). L.D. says she doesn't have to, but Steph tosses her head, looks sideways at L.D, and smoulders, "I'm getting pretty good at speeches, you know." L.D, completely oblivious to Steph's dubious charms, cheerfully answers that Steph can say whatever she likes.
"Can I wear my new wet-look bikini? It's hot pink," says Stephanie. "Sure, wear whatever you like," L.D. says with difficulty, obviusly getting more and more uncomfortable with Steph's leching, but aware that this is the price of getting her to appear at the race. I feel a bit sorry for L.D., because she's considerably more mature than most of the people around her, and also because those sexist brothers she mentioned earlier? Don't exist. We get a whole episode later on centred around her home life, and she has no brothers. Whatever gets her through the day, I guess, but it seems kind of sad to me.
Melanie comes out of the cubicle, wearing the new bra under her T-shirt. The others stare. "What do you think?" she asks. The others tell her she looks "real nice", though Stephanie needs a bit of prompting from L.D., and is a terrible liar. "Isn't it great? I feel grown up at last!" sighs Melanie, and heads out to work her Wonderbra magic on the general population. Stephanie smirks.
Out in the corridor, Melanie meets Susie and Caitlin. They say hello, but that's all, so Melanie ostentatiously fidgets with her bra. They look rather disturbed at first, but eventually Caitlin catches on and says, "Your mum changed her mind!" Jeez, did Melanie tell the whole school about her braless woes? The girls awkwardly compliment her new bust.
And speaking of busts, here comes the bust connoisseur himself, Joey Jeremiah! "Nice BRA, Melanie," he says, then pretends to sneeze and asks her for a Kleenex. Melanie insists her suspiciously lumpy bosom is not made of Kleenex and Caitlin witheringly tells him to knock it off. Joey and Tim crack themselves up comparing Melanie's boobs to variously-sized fruits, then finish with a wolf-howl for some reason. Excessively ominous music plays. Melanie is crushed. Teenage boys say stupid things? Who knew?
At lunchtime, Sexist Jason, Wheels, and some guy who I don't think will ever appear again but whom the credits refer to as "Wai Lee" are huddled in a stairwell. Jason is insisting that the guys can't back down or everyone will call them chicken (and thankfully doesn't go of into a rambling discussion of chicken parts, a la Melanie)."We'll look pretty dumb if we lose," counters Wai Lee through a mouthful of carrot sticks. Wheels utters a cogent but very poorly acted speech about why the guys are utterly fucked, but Jason is still in frantic denial. "I thought you were men!" he wails. Wheels looks appalled at this error of judgement. Wai Lee just chomps on a carrot stick, which is an answer in itself, as carrot sticks are the wussiest of school lunches.
Jason suggests that they could win if Snake swims with them, but Wheels points out that he's not on the soccer team. Wai Lee specifies that Snake was, in fact, cut from the team for being terrible. Jason says that he's a good swimmer, and makes the others promise to swim in the race if he can get Snake to join. It seems that Sexist Jason is also Unethical Jason!
Snake the Man-God is unsuspectingly eating lunch on the front steps, wearing a huge pair of sunglasses with a cord around his neck, like old women have. But apparently in the '80s this just heightened a man's allure: women want to be with Snake, men want to be him. Arthur and Yick are staking him out from behind a bike rack, but they're too far away to see what he's eating. Just as they're getting ready to wander by for a better look, Generally Unsavoury Jason barges past them and goes to sit next to Snake.
Jason asks Snake to swim with the boys in the race, but Snake reminds him that he's not on the team due to his previously mentioned suckitude. "No," says Jason, "I remember the tryouts. You were… not bad, actually." That's some nice lying. Snake is still having some ethical qualms but Jason says he'll get him another tryout if he agrees to swim. Snake sort of agrees to it.
Jason goes, and Snake takes out his lunch. It's a pot of yogurt. Yick and Arthur are staring at him from two feet away. After a minute, he realises, and looks up. "Uh… excuse me… is that yogurt?" asks Arthur raptly. "Yeah," says Snake, looking so weirded out he might cry. The boys walk off, and Yick points out that he eats yogurt all the time and is still short, so Arthur decides that they need to find out what Snake eats after school. Because the problem couldn't possibly be that their plan is stupid in the first place. Nuh-uh.
Later, in English class, Mr Raditch is reading out loud (the Player Queen's lines from Hamlet, in a squeaky woman's voice, since you asked). The line he's reading contains the word "breast", and all the boys laugh. Susie rolls her eyes in mature disgust; Caitlin gives the boys a look of pure loathing. The mention of breasts gives Alex an idea, and he reaches over and snaps Melanie's bra. "Ow!" she screams. Mr Raditch glowers at her and asks sarcastically if there's something she'd like to share with the rest of the class, like she would yell "Ow!" as a hilarious prank. Raditch is obviously unfamiliar with the concept of hilarity. Melanie hides her face in her hands. More ominous music. Let this be a lesson to you all, girls: breasts are a source of unending public shame, and don't you forget it.
After class, a glum Melanie shuffles out of the room, with Susie and Caitlin making feeble attempts to cheer her up. Joey yells that he can't wait to see her in her bathing suit. Melanie looks yet more shamefaced. Snake overhears and watches her anxiously, or he might just be daydreaming about bathing suits. Steph has a pink wet-look bikini she'd love to show him.
Melanie mopes out into the stairwell, where there's a poster advertising an "informal current affairs discussion group" run by Ms Avery. Because Ms Avery is a liberal. L.D. catches up with Melanie and complains that half the swim team are refusing to swim because they've got their periods, or don't want the boys to see them in swimsuits, but "at least there's four of us – Susie, Caitlin, me and you –" "I'm not swimming," says Melanie. L.D. freaks out, but Melanie walks off. Commercial break.
A little later, the boys are practicing soccer, and Wheels isn't very good in goal, by the way. Melanie and L.D. walk by, Melanie still insisting she won't swim. L.D. delivers a heartfelt speech about how winning this race would let her overcome the years of gender-based trauma she's suffered at the hands of her sexist brothers, which would be very touching if her brothers EXISTED.
Melanie, who's somehow acquired a big black cardigan with which to cover her shameful body, says that everyone laughed at her today and it'll be worse if they see her in a swimsuit. She insists that her bra isn't stuffed, it just "shapes" her, but she can't wear it under her "Speedo" (good lord, does the product placement never end?) and she'll look flat and the mockery will never end. She walks sadly homewards, the logo on her brand-new Speedo sports bag clearly legible. Yes, really.
Meanwhile, back on the soccer pitch, Jason and Snake come over and Jason announces that the coach let Snake on the team (presumably the coach is easily bribed). Manly cheering. The boys start to play, but Snake is just as bad at soccer as we have been led to believe. He tries to weasel out, but Jason insists he just needs practice.
Later, Arthur and Yick are lurking outside an unbelievably dingy shop called the "De Grassi Grocery", which looks like the kind of place with a secret back room where they remove bullets, no questions asked. Arthur watches through a pair of binoculars as Snake comes out eating something, which they identify as a "Super Crunch Delight". Once he's gone, they run in and buy forty of them. Oh, those boys!
Next morning. Melanie comes into school, still carrying her Speedo bag despite insisting she won't swim, and in comes Jason, also with a Speedo bag. This is getting ridiculous. Jason goes over to Snake, and then sees L.D., and proudly tells her Snake's on the team. L.D. knows what he's up to, Jason says there's nothing she can do about it, and Snake watches them argue. He grins goofily every time he looks at Jason and seems troubled and qualmy every time he looks at L.D. "I still don't think this is right," he says after L.D. is gone. Jason doesn't give a crap.
Inside, Melanie's going upstairs when she sees Joey and Tim (in a bookie's hat) taking bets on the race. Is there no adult supervision in this school? Cut to Snake, alone, tormentedly eating a Super Crunch Delight – the brunch of champions! – on the front steps.
Jason comes into the boys' changing room, but finds only Wheels and the perpetually depressed Wai Lee. "Where's Snake?" asks Wheels. "He's not here?" says Jason. "Sure he is," snarks Wheels. "He's just so thin you missed him." Heh. The others obviously hold Jason personally responsible for this hitch in their cheating plans, so he runs off to look for Snake the Man-God before they mutiny.
Meanwhile, Susie, L.D. and Caitlin are in their changing room, doing warm-ups in their spiffy matching Adidas jackets YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING. Oh look, a Speedo poster on the wall. The girls are all pretty depressed, because apparently Melanie's been carrying this team all along and they're doomed without her. Stephanie, in her tried-and-trusted pink boob tube and minty green miniskirt, her hair freshly back-combed to full mushroomy glory, practises her speech: "It's a big day for the girls' swim team, blah blah blah." Yes, really. L.D. asks what happened to the pink wet-look bikini, but Steph says there's too many people out there. What, all of a sudden she's developed a sense of shame? This isn’t the Steph we know and tolerate!
Jason runs through the deserted halls calling forlornly for Snake. It would be touching, if Jason wasn't such a pain in the ass.
Somebody's remembered that the subplot needed wrapping up. Cut to Arthur and Yick hanging onto one of those laddery climbing-frame thingies they have in school gyms, in an effort to stretch. "I'll never eat another Super Crunch Delight again," says Arthur. "I was sick all night." "Me too," grunts Yick. "My arms hurt." "Mine too. But that's the price of getting tall – there's no gain without pain," says Arthur. My sides are splitting, I assure you.
Finally, Jason finds another human being in the corridors, but unfortunately for him it's mere mortal Melanie. She says she hasn't seen Snake. "Aren't you supposed to be getting ready to swim?" asks Jason. When she can't look him in the eye, he realises she's not swimming, and is so delighted he does one of those little sideways kicks as he goes off to keep looking for Snake. It would be cute, if Jason wasn't such a pain in the ass.
Eventually he gives up, and returns to the changing room. He announces that Snake's still missing, but they don't need him, because Melanie's not swimming either. There's another Speedo poster in the boys' changing room, no surprise there, only it shows some huge oiled-up muscly guy in the world's smallest bulgiest swimming trunks, and frankly it's a little creepy.
With a level of self-belief that would be inspiring if he wasn't such a pain in the ass, Jason declares that Melanie backed out of the race because she knows the boys are going to win. Wai Lee and Wheels finally fall for his web of confidence-building lies, and exchange giant grins.
Meanwhile, Snake is sitting in godly isolation on the front steps, eating some kind of brown mush wrapped in tinfoil. Melanie comes out the door and tells him Jason's looking for him. "Yeah, well," snaps Snake. Then: "I thought you were swimming?" "I thought you were swimming," says Melanie.
Snake explains that he quit because it "wasn't right", as he was only put on the soccer team in order to rig the race. "They said I can play, but I know I can't. I used to be pretty good… but since I got tall, my feet don't always do what I tell them to any more." And this is the tragic revelation of the episode: puberty is a bitch, and it will shatter your dreams. Speaking of which, wouldn't big breasts make you all unstreamlined, so you couldn't swim as fast? Melanie had better hope she stays flat-chested.
Snake asks Melanie why she's not swimming. "I bought this b…" she trails off. "You saw the way Joey and them laughed at me. And I hate being laughed at."
Snake the Man-God, of course, has the answer: "Everyone hates being laughed at. But you can't let that stop you from doing stuff." Wow, that's like, totally deep. Melanie looks inspired. Hers has been a life very starved of inspirational material.
Joey leads his posse of male chauvinists into the stands by the pool. As the school song plays (of course), the girls' team emerge from the changing rooms in their snazzy Speedo/Adidas outfits. Much cheering from the girls, booing from the boys, and brandishing of handmade placards from everyone, because people had a lot of time on their hands before the internet. Then the boys' team comes out of their door. Cheering from the boys, and also for some reason from Alexa. Sell-out.
Inside the locker room, Melanie's in her swimsuit. She stares ponderously at herself in the mirror, then checks out her bosom one last time. Nope, still small.
Outside, the teams are standing by the edge of the pool, when the girls' door opens again and Melanie comes out. Her team-mates cheer. Wheels and Wai Lee look like they might beat up Jason. Joey leans over and yells, "Hey Melanie! You're so flat the walls are jealous!" Ominous music, but Melanie meets L.D.'s eye and they smile at each other, fondly remembering their hilarious Wonderbra-based capers of two days ago. With that, L.D. runs over to Joey, grabs him and throws him in the pool. Everybody laughs (even Rick! Caitlin would be proud).
Once Joey's been rescued by his chauvinist sidekicks, Stephanie starts the race. Thankfully, this is one Steph speech that doesn't end in a giant group makeout session or in vomiting. Though when the swimmers dive in, she gets splashed and recoils like the Wicked Witch of the West. People swim, the audience cheers (Snake's turned up to watch). Melanie swims last. Obviously she wins. In the grand tradition of this show, the credits roll over an unflattering, blurry still of her grinning face. But at least her teeth are straight.
Dubious lessons of the week: In the great race that is puberty, there are no winners. Also, Wonderbras are the sine qua non of womanhood and Speedo and Adidas make the most delightful sportswear.
"Checking!" says Melanie brightly. "Checking?" asks L.D., who knows where this conversation is going and doesn't want to go there. And who could blame her?
"My mom won't let me get a bra. Which is really unfair, 'cause I need one. Don't you think?" asks Melanie. L.D. looks kind of panicked and mumbles something ineffective, but when Melanie gets mad, L.D. reluctantly agrees with her. "It's obvious!" insists Melanie. "I don't know what's wrong with my mom. Maybe she needs glasses or something?" L.D. politely resists the urge to point out that if your boobs can't be seen without glasses, they may not be all that big. The swimming coach comes in and calls the girls out. L.D. has to drag Melanie away from her fascinated contemplation of her own breasts. Opening credits.
So, there's a swimming pool, and people are swimming in it. People in swimming caps and goggles give me the creeps – they look like aliens. Anyway, Melanie is a fast swimmer, and they win because of her. This is Important to the Plot. Everyone jumps into the pool to celebrate. High-fives ensue.
Later, everyone's leaving Mr Raditch's classroom. Joey comes up to Steph, and breaks out a line he's obviously been working on all day: "Hey Stephanie, did you know I got an A+ in sex education last year? So if there's anything you want to know, Joey P. Jeremiah – P for Playboy – at your service." Thank GOD the P is for Playboy (and I'm pretty sure the uppercase P is appropriate here, as I think Joey has more experience of tacky "men's magazines" than of actual playboyism). Steph inexplicably continues to be entertained by Joey's flirting, and even feigns interest in the cutouts of "hot" '80s chicks and motorbikes pasted inside his locker. I never thought I'd say this, but Stephanie Kaye is aiming too low here.
L.D. runs up and tells Steph that the girls won their swimming race and are in the city finals of something unspecified. "Great," says Steph, with a spectacularly insincere toothy smile. L.D asks her to make an announcement about it, but Steph tells her that school presidents don't announce sports and to go see someone called Jason Cox. As so often happens to characters on this show, L.D. doesn't seem to realise she's being snubbed, and runs off to find Jason.
Close-up on the inside of Arthur's locker. We see a clumsily hand-drawn height chart with Arthur and Yick's heights marked. Arthur's replaced his owl poster with some horrifying photo of a sort of mummified face with lots of plaster of Paris melting off it, like if you were delirious from malaria and then took acid, you might have hallucinations of this sort of thing. There's also a really disturbing artist's reconstruction of a buck-toothed teenage Neanderthal, a poster of a slug, and another one called "Insects on Parade".
Yick and Arthur take turns standing up against the height chart, and both are pissed off to discover that they're still short, just like yesterday. They rail against cruel Fate for a bit, and just as they're going to leave, Snake (who's at least 6 feet tall) walks by. They both watch him like he is a man-god, come to earth just to make them look even shorter by comparison.
Melanie's getting books out of her locker when Snake the Man-God appears and goes to his locker, which is a couple feet away. Melanie blatantly ogles him, until he looks over at her and she turns away hastily. Scene from the credits! Snake totally noticed, though, and gives her an "Awww, cute" kind of smile. Which is not actually that encouraging, from her point of view.
Meanwhile, Mr Lawrence is on the PA again, and announces that the music club is looking for new members, and "new tuba players would be especially appreciated". Seriously, this is the weirdest running joke ever.
L.D comes over and teases Melanie about liking Snake. Melanie denies it unconvincingly. Random girls appear and congratulate them about the swimming thing. Did you know the girls are good at swimming? Pay attention.
A kid runs up to Doris the Secretary's desk, and he's got a football under his arm so you know he's Jason Cox, the sports guy Stephanie mentioned earlier. He tells Doris he needs to make an announcement on the PA. "Ok, just keep it brief. I've got a date!" says Doris, sounding all excited and squeeish. Awww. While Doris anxiously touches up her makeup (hee!), Jason announces that the boys have a soccer match that afternoon, and everyone should turn up to support them. No mention of the girls' swimming team. L.D. and Melanie hear him, and are filled with righteous feminist rage.
Outside the school, Arthur and Yick hide behind their stalking tree and spy on Snake. "How come he gets to be tall?" asks Yick resentfully. "I'm not sure," says Arthur, "but I read somewhere that you are what you eat. Maybe we should find out what he eats." Arthur needs to find some better reading material.
The boys are getting on with the important manly business of kicking a soccer ball at random, while some girls (who know their place) practice cheerleading. L.D. and Melanie march up to Jason and demand to talk to him. L.D. asks why he didn't make an announcement about the swimming team, and Jason says he didn't have time. L.D. correctly points out that this is a stupid excuse.
"Ladies, ladies," Jason begins. And nothing good ever started with that. "People don't care about girls' sports. Girls aren't good athletes." Smug nods from the soccer team. Indignation from L.D. and Melanie (and a collection of girls who've appeared out of nowhere). "Don't get mad at me," says Jason. "It's human nature, right?" "Ya, right on!" say the boys.
L.D. points out that the girls are actually good at swimming, while the boys lose all their matches. Jason has an answer: "We're unlucky, that's all. Anyway, soccer's tough. If you win, big deal. If we were swimming against a bunch of girls, we'd win too." The man knows how to work a crowd.
L.D. challenges the boys' soccer team to a swimming race against the girls. Jason looks around at the rest of his team. The other guys look nauseous, cough and stare at their shoes. "Ok!" says Jason. "We'll be there!" His undoubted talents obviously don't include reading body language. The boys then hurry off and get into a minivan, presumably to go to their doomed soccer game. Jason actually grabs the cheerleaders by the arms and shepherds them in too. What a gent.
Snake's been watching the whole argument, and now exchanges goofy grins with Melanie before cycling off.
The next scene opens with some tremendously blatant product placement: a very tight close-up of two McDonald's milkshakes being slurped tantalisingly (it's that old packaging where everything had rows of M's in regulation '80s shades of brown and yellow, which makes me feel both nostalgic and hungry). The camera pulls out to reveal that the delicious, delicious milkshakes are being drunk by L.D. and Melanie.
"What a sexist!" whines L.D. "He's just like my brothers. They think just because I'm a girl, I'm a second-class person. Well, we'll show Jason, right?" Melanie is entirely not listening, and wonders out loud if Snake just sees her as a kid "But who could blame him? It's my mum's fault. She thinks I'm still a little kid! I'm nearly a teenager. A passionate teenager whose dumb mom won't let her buy a bra."
L.D. listens open-mouthed to this baffling monologue, then stands up and drags Melanie down the road, announcing that they're going to go buy a bra. Off they go, with Melanie making shrieky noises of protest, watched by passerby Nancy, who seems to exist for the sole purpose of rolling her eyes at the crazy antics of the main characters.
More product placement! Closeup of a shiny Wonderbra sign in a department store, which lists (in French and English!) the range of bra types made by Wonderbra. We will also see large numbers of clearly branded Wonderbras on the shelves and a poster for something called the "Wonderbra support system". Wonderbra Wonderbra Wonderbra. This is shameless. On the other hand, the bras the girls look at are all horrible things so big they could qualify as nightdresses, and the underwear models on the posters are all suicidal-looking middle-aged bottle blondes, so this may not have actually done much for Wonderbra sales.
"I can't do this!" giggles Melanie. "Of course you can! Don't be so chicken!" L.D. tells her. Melanie utters yet another timeless nonsensical Melanie speech: "I am not chicken! Well, maybe a little bit, but not a lot, though, sort of like a chicken wing, without the legs, or breasts…" "Ha ha! Breasts!" says L.D., and they collapse (almost literally) into giggles. Hilarious.
"What'll I tell my mom?" asks Melanie. "She doesn't have to know," says L.D. "You can change at school like Stephanie!" "Oh, like Stephanie," says Melanie, in a valiant attempt at withering sarcasm. She clearly realises that taking Stephanie as a role model in any area of life is a recipe for disaster. Smart kid.
L.D. shoves a huge bra at Melanie, who looks terrified, and then takes another one and sticks it over Melanie's eyes like a blindfold, which is pretty weird, really, and Melanie looks like she doesn't know whether to be amused or to run screaming and just avoid the whole bra issue by getting a sex change.
Before Melanie can make any life-changing decisions, though, an old and for some reason English shop assistant whooshes up and asks if she can help them. "She wants to buy a bra," explains L.D. "Mmmm!" says the woman eagerly, which, girls, should be your cue to run. She makes a vague attempt to measure Melanie (i.e. wraps a measuring tape diagonally around her torso, so that it goes under one boob and over the other) and declares, "I think I know what you'd like." She yanks a random bra off the rack and holds it up reverently, murmuring, "It is lovely, isn't it?" like it's some kind of antique Chinese embroidery rather than a fugly nylon bra – but at least the Wonderbra marketing department are getting their money's worth. Melanie smiles politely and wonders if this woman is actually insane.
"Would you like to try it on?" asks the bra lady. "What? Here?" asks Melanie in disgust. "In the change rooms, dummy!" explains L.D. Aw man, do you remember when you were a kid and your mother would make you try stuff on behind a rack of clothes if there was a big queue for the changing rooms, and it was the most embarrassing thing ever? Or was that just my mother?
"You really should try it on," says the bra lady. "You can't bring it back." She is extraordinarily patient with these two, who are laughing so squeakily through all of this that I think they might be back on the New Zealand Zappers. Off they go to the changing rooms, where no doubt more bra-based hilarity ensues, but thankfully we're spared actually having to watch it.
Next morning, Stephanie is in the Bathroom of Skanky Transformations, putting blusher on her cheeks and also on her chin for some reason. L.D. is begging her to put in an appearance at the swimming race. "Do I get to make a speech?" asks Steph, in her flirty voice (I guess she's decided that it's easier to just leave it switched on all the time, or else that a bit of lesbian flirting will provide her with a much-needed change of pace). L.D. says she doesn't have to, but Steph tosses her head, looks sideways at L.D, and smoulders, "I'm getting pretty good at speeches, you know." L.D, completely oblivious to Steph's dubious charms, cheerfully answers that Steph can say whatever she likes.
"Can I wear my new wet-look bikini? It's hot pink," says Stephanie. "Sure, wear whatever you like," L.D. says with difficulty, obviusly getting more and more uncomfortable with Steph's leching, but aware that this is the price of getting her to appear at the race. I feel a bit sorry for L.D., because she's considerably more mature than most of the people around her, and also because those sexist brothers she mentioned earlier? Don't exist. We get a whole episode later on centred around her home life, and she has no brothers. Whatever gets her through the day, I guess, but it seems kind of sad to me.
Melanie comes out of the cubicle, wearing the new bra under her T-shirt. The others stare. "What do you think?" she asks. The others tell her she looks "real nice", though Stephanie needs a bit of prompting from L.D., and is a terrible liar. "Isn't it great? I feel grown up at last!" sighs Melanie, and heads out to work her Wonderbra magic on the general population. Stephanie smirks.
Out in the corridor, Melanie meets Susie and Caitlin. They say hello, but that's all, so Melanie ostentatiously fidgets with her bra. They look rather disturbed at first, but eventually Caitlin catches on and says, "Your mum changed her mind!" Jeez, did Melanie tell the whole school about her braless woes? The girls awkwardly compliment her new bust.
And speaking of busts, here comes the bust connoisseur himself, Joey Jeremiah! "Nice BRA, Melanie," he says, then pretends to sneeze and asks her for a Kleenex. Melanie insists her suspiciously lumpy bosom is not made of Kleenex and Caitlin witheringly tells him to knock it off. Joey and Tim crack themselves up comparing Melanie's boobs to variously-sized fruits, then finish with a wolf-howl for some reason. Excessively ominous music plays. Melanie is crushed. Teenage boys say stupid things? Who knew?
At lunchtime, Sexist Jason, Wheels, and some guy who I don't think will ever appear again but whom the credits refer to as "Wai Lee" are huddled in a stairwell. Jason is insisting that the guys can't back down or everyone will call them chicken (and thankfully doesn't go of into a rambling discussion of chicken parts, a la Melanie)."We'll look pretty dumb if we lose," counters Wai Lee through a mouthful of carrot sticks. Wheels utters a cogent but very poorly acted speech about why the guys are utterly fucked, but Jason is still in frantic denial. "I thought you were men!" he wails. Wheels looks appalled at this error of judgement. Wai Lee just chomps on a carrot stick, which is an answer in itself, as carrot sticks are the wussiest of school lunches.
Jason suggests that they could win if Snake swims with them, but Wheels points out that he's not on the soccer team. Wai Lee specifies that Snake was, in fact, cut from the team for being terrible. Jason says that he's a good swimmer, and makes the others promise to swim in the race if he can get Snake to join. It seems that Sexist Jason is also Unethical Jason!
Snake the Man-God is unsuspectingly eating lunch on the front steps, wearing a huge pair of sunglasses with a cord around his neck, like old women have. But apparently in the '80s this just heightened a man's allure: women want to be with Snake, men want to be him. Arthur and Yick are staking him out from behind a bike rack, but they're too far away to see what he's eating. Just as they're getting ready to wander by for a better look, Generally Unsavoury Jason barges past them and goes to sit next to Snake.
Jason asks Snake to swim with the boys in the race, but Snake reminds him that he's not on the team due to his previously mentioned suckitude. "No," says Jason, "I remember the tryouts. You were… not bad, actually." That's some nice lying. Snake is still having some ethical qualms but Jason says he'll get him another tryout if he agrees to swim. Snake sort of agrees to it.
Jason goes, and Snake takes out his lunch. It's a pot of yogurt. Yick and Arthur are staring at him from two feet away. After a minute, he realises, and looks up. "Uh… excuse me… is that yogurt?" asks Arthur raptly. "Yeah," says Snake, looking so weirded out he might cry. The boys walk off, and Yick points out that he eats yogurt all the time and is still short, so Arthur decides that they need to find out what Snake eats after school. Because the problem couldn't possibly be that their plan is stupid in the first place. Nuh-uh.
Later, in English class, Mr Raditch is reading out loud (the Player Queen's lines from Hamlet, in a squeaky woman's voice, since you asked). The line he's reading contains the word "breast", and all the boys laugh. Susie rolls her eyes in mature disgust; Caitlin gives the boys a look of pure loathing. The mention of breasts gives Alex an idea, and he reaches over and snaps Melanie's bra. "Ow!" she screams. Mr Raditch glowers at her and asks sarcastically if there's something she'd like to share with the rest of the class, like she would yell "Ow!" as a hilarious prank. Raditch is obviously unfamiliar with the concept of hilarity. Melanie hides her face in her hands. More ominous music. Let this be a lesson to you all, girls: breasts are a source of unending public shame, and don't you forget it.
After class, a glum Melanie shuffles out of the room, with Susie and Caitlin making feeble attempts to cheer her up. Joey yells that he can't wait to see her in her bathing suit. Melanie looks yet more shamefaced. Snake overhears and watches her anxiously, or he might just be daydreaming about bathing suits. Steph has a pink wet-look bikini she'd love to show him.
Melanie mopes out into the stairwell, where there's a poster advertising an "informal current affairs discussion group" run by Ms Avery. Because Ms Avery is a liberal. L.D. catches up with Melanie and complains that half the swim team are refusing to swim because they've got their periods, or don't want the boys to see them in swimsuits, but "at least there's four of us – Susie, Caitlin, me and you –" "I'm not swimming," says Melanie. L.D. freaks out, but Melanie walks off. Commercial break.
A little later, the boys are practicing soccer, and Wheels isn't very good in goal, by the way. Melanie and L.D. walk by, Melanie still insisting she won't swim. L.D. delivers a heartfelt speech about how winning this race would let her overcome the years of gender-based trauma she's suffered at the hands of her sexist brothers, which would be very touching if her brothers EXISTED.
Melanie, who's somehow acquired a big black cardigan with which to cover her shameful body, says that everyone laughed at her today and it'll be worse if they see her in a swimsuit. She insists that her bra isn't stuffed, it just "shapes" her, but she can't wear it under her "Speedo" (good lord, does the product placement never end?) and she'll look flat and the mockery will never end. She walks sadly homewards, the logo on her brand-new Speedo sports bag clearly legible. Yes, really.
Meanwhile, back on the soccer pitch, Jason and Snake come over and Jason announces that the coach let Snake on the team (presumably the coach is easily bribed). Manly cheering. The boys start to play, but Snake is just as bad at soccer as we have been led to believe. He tries to weasel out, but Jason insists he just needs practice.
Later, Arthur and Yick are lurking outside an unbelievably dingy shop called the "De Grassi Grocery", which looks like the kind of place with a secret back room where they remove bullets, no questions asked. Arthur watches through a pair of binoculars as Snake comes out eating something, which they identify as a "Super Crunch Delight". Once he's gone, they run in and buy forty of them. Oh, those boys!
Next morning. Melanie comes into school, still carrying her Speedo bag despite insisting she won't swim, and in comes Jason, also with a Speedo bag. This is getting ridiculous. Jason goes over to Snake, and then sees L.D., and proudly tells her Snake's on the team. L.D. knows what he's up to, Jason says there's nothing she can do about it, and Snake watches them argue. He grins goofily every time he looks at Jason and seems troubled and qualmy every time he looks at L.D. "I still don't think this is right," he says after L.D. is gone. Jason doesn't give a crap.
Inside, Melanie's going upstairs when she sees Joey and Tim (in a bookie's hat) taking bets on the race. Is there no adult supervision in this school? Cut to Snake, alone, tormentedly eating a Super Crunch Delight – the brunch of champions! – on the front steps.
Jason comes into the boys' changing room, but finds only Wheels and the perpetually depressed Wai Lee. "Where's Snake?" asks Wheels. "He's not here?" says Jason. "Sure he is," snarks Wheels. "He's just so thin you missed him." Heh. The others obviously hold Jason personally responsible for this hitch in their cheating plans, so he runs off to look for Snake the Man-God before they mutiny.
Meanwhile, Susie, L.D. and Caitlin are in their changing room, doing warm-ups in their spiffy matching Adidas jackets YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING. Oh look, a Speedo poster on the wall. The girls are all pretty depressed, because apparently Melanie's been carrying this team all along and they're doomed without her. Stephanie, in her tried-and-trusted pink boob tube and minty green miniskirt, her hair freshly back-combed to full mushroomy glory, practises her speech: "It's a big day for the girls' swim team, blah blah blah." Yes, really. L.D. asks what happened to the pink wet-look bikini, but Steph says there's too many people out there. What, all of a sudden she's developed a sense of shame? This isn’t the Steph we know and tolerate!
Jason runs through the deserted halls calling forlornly for Snake. It would be touching, if Jason wasn't such a pain in the ass.
Somebody's remembered that the subplot needed wrapping up. Cut to Arthur and Yick hanging onto one of those laddery climbing-frame thingies they have in school gyms, in an effort to stretch. "I'll never eat another Super Crunch Delight again," says Arthur. "I was sick all night." "Me too," grunts Yick. "My arms hurt." "Mine too. But that's the price of getting tall – there's no gain without pain," says Arthur. My sides are splitting, I assure you.
Finally, Jason finds another human being in the corridors, but unfortunately for him it's mere mortal Melanie. She says she hasn't seen Snake. "Aren't you supposed to be getting ready to swim?" asks Jason. When she can't look him in the eye, he realises she's not swimming, and is so delighted he does one of those little sideways kicks as he goes off to keep looking for Snake. It would be cute, if Jason wasn't such a pain in the ass.
Eventually he gives up, and returns to the changing room. He announces that Snake's still missing, but they don't need him, because Melanie's not swimming either. There's another Speedo poster in the boys' changing room, no surprise there, only it shows some huge oiled-up muscly guy in the world's smallest bulgiest swimming trunks, and frankly it's a little creepy.
With a level of self-belief that would be inspiring if he wasn't such a pain in the ass, Jason declares that Melanie backed out of the race because she knows the boys are going to win. Wai Lee and Wheels finally fall for his web of confidence-building lies, and exchange giant grins.
Meanwhile, Snake is sitting in godly isolation on the front steps, eating some kind of brown mush wrapped in tinfoil. Melanie comes out the door and tells him Jason's looking for him. "Yeah, well," snaps Snake. Then: "I thought you were swimming?" "I thought you were swimming," says Melanie.
Snake explains that he quit because it "wasn't right", as he was only put on the soccer team in order to rig the race. "They said I can play, but I know I can't. I used to be pretty good… but since I got tall, my feet don't always do what I tell them to any more." And this is the tragic revelation of the episode: puberty is a bitch, and it will shatter your dreams. Speaking of which, wouldn't big breasts make you all unstreamlined, so you couldn't swim as fast? Melanie had better hope she stays flat-chested.
Snake asks Melanie why she's not swimming. "I bought this b…" she trails off. "You saw the way Joey and them laughed at me. And I hate being laughed at."
Snake the Man-God, of course, has the answer: "Everyone hates being laughed at. But you can't let that stop you from doing stuff." Wow, that's like, totally deep. Melanie looks inspired. Hers has been a life very starved of inspirational material.
Joey leads his posse of male chauvinists into the stands by the pool. As the school song plays (of course), the girls' team emerge from the changing rooms in their snazzy Speedo/Adidas outfits. Much cheering from the girls, booing from the boys, and brandishing of handmade placards from everyone, because people had a lot of time on their hands before the internet. Then the boys' team comes out of their door. Cheering from the boys, and also for some reason from Alexa. Sell-out.
Inside the locker room, Melanie's in her swimsuit. She stares ponderously at herself in the mirror, then checks out her bosom one last time. Nope, still small.
Outside, the teams are standing by the edge of the pool, when the girls' door opens again and Melanie comes out. Her team-mates cheer. Wheels and Wai Lee look like they might beat up Jason. Joey leans over and yells, "Hey Melanie! You're so flat the walls are jealous!" Ominous music, but Melanie meets L.D.'s eye and they smile at each other, fondly remembering their hilarious Wonderbra-based capers of two days ago. With that, L.D. runs over to Joey, grabs him and throws him in the pool. Everybody laughs (even Rick! Caitlin would be proud).
Once Joey's been rescued by his chauvinist sidekicks, Stephanie starts the race. Thankfully, this is one Steph speech that doesn't end in a giant group makeout session or in vomiting. Though when the swimmers dive in, she gets splashed and recoils like the Wicked Witch of the West. People swim, the audience cheers (Snake's turned up to watch). Melanie swims last. Obviously she wins. In the grand tradition of this show, the credits roll over an unflattering, blurry still of her grinning face. But at least her teeth are straight.
Dubious lessons of the week: In the great race that is puberty, there are no winners. Also, Wonderbras are the sine qua non of womanhood and Speedo and Adidas make the most delightful sportswear.
Friday, May 29, 2009
S01 E04 - The Cover-Up
Morning. Rick's sitting at the table reading a magazine on motorbikes. There are sirens in the background, because he lives in a working-class neighbourhood. The room is a mess because Rick's mom isn't around. There's a carton labelled "homo milk" on the table, for which I have no explanation.
Anyway, Rick's dad comes in, looking for his tie. Rick's dad has some of the worst grownup hair on this show (although the actual worst comes later in this episode). Combining two deeply wrong hairstyles, it's huge and fluffy like clown hair, and it's also a mullet. He spots Rick's magazine and asks where he got it, and if "Frank" gave it to him. We get the impression that he would definitely not see this as a good thing.
Rick's well aware of this, and says that he bought the magazine. His dad accuses him of stealing it, but Rick says he bought it with money he got for recycling some bottles. His dad starts lecturing him about how they don't have money to waste on stuff like this, while some kind of train or something goes by, in the next room by the sound of it, just in case you'd forgotten it was a working-class neighbourhood.
Rick's Bad Dad complains that he had "plans" for that money, and mumbles something that sounds like "get out of town with it". Rick's pretty sceptical about the idea that you could get out of town with the proceeds of recycling your bottles, but it seems Bad Dad really doesn't like it when people knock his ridiculous ambitions.
He comes over to Rick, his eyes all bulgy. "Don't you ever talk back to me again!" he says. Then he hits Rick. Then conveniently holds him still so the camera can pan over his bruises from previous beatings. Well, that's depressing.
Hey, it's the inappropriately cheerful opening credits! That'll cheer us up! Forget about the miserable squalid scene of child abuse you just saw!
Outside the school. Rick cycles up to the bike racks, accompanied by guitar music that might have passed for vaguely punky and rebellious once upon a time, and definitely doesn't now, but at least it's a change from the synth kazoo horror of last episode. His bike is some weird thing with a tiny front wheel, and it also has those little rear-view mirrors sticking up from the handlebars like on a motorbike, which is sort of cute.
Joey is dicking around on his skateboard, and for some reason he's going for a French beatnik vibe this episode, having spiced up his usual rotation of fedoras with the addition of a black beret. He's so busy showing off that he crashes into some purposeless concrete obstacle and lands face-first in the grass. Susie and Caitlin watch aghast, as does Stephanie, who's still in her morning burqa. Not that they actually move to do anything. Mr Raditch rushes over, but is disappointed when he realises that Joey's actually pretty much fine, except for a black eye and some stage blood on his forehead. He tells him to go see the nurse, then report to Mr Lawrence for a chastening.
When Joey's gone, Rick goes back to doing some nonspecific bike-tending. At least he got his motorbike magazine back. He's also got him a fanclub – Caitlin and Susie are staring at him from a distance. Susie says he's "sooo cute", and Caitlin distantly says, "Yeah. I hear he's on probation." It doesn't sound like that enhances his appeal for her. In a sweeping moment of judgmentalness, she decides that he's on probation for beating people up, because "he's always got lots of bruises". Bitch.
(I should warn you that I adore Rick, in a wholesome, maternal way, and I won't hear a word said against him. Plus, way to spectacularly misjudge the situation, Caitlin.)
Joey arrives at Mr Lawrence's office, apparently wearing some cotton wool taped to his head with the brown sellotape you use for parcels. Doris the School Secretary asks him what happened, and he claims he was rescuing a kid from being beaten up. FORESHADOWING OMG.
Doris isn't buying any of this BS, and calls his bluff by asking if he's here for a commendation. Joey admits that he's been sent to see Mr Lawrence. She calls the principal on his intercom, and his creepy disembodied voice sighs, "Send him in." Mr Lawrence sounds as if he's weary of life. But so might you, if you had to deal with Joey on a regular basis.
Once Joey's out of the way, Doris goes on the PA to make an announcement: it's photo day on Thursday, and they should all try to dress their best "for a change". Helpfully, we also see a poster repeating the same information. Wow, I wonder if photo day might have some importance to the plot later on? Steph and Spike are walking down the hallway chatting. I can't tell if their horrible awkwardness is intentional because those characters aren't friends, or just due to bad acting.
Anyway, Steph weasels away and goes into the Bathroom of Skanky Transformations. While she's enacting said transformation, Voula comes out of one of the cubicles. Steph tries to say hello, but Voula manages to say hello back in a way that's even colder than ignoring her would have been.
Steph grudgingly apologises for her general crappy electoral behaviour and asks if Voula's ever going to forgive her. I'd say the answer is no, because all Voula says is "You'd better watch out, Stephanie. It wouldn't look good for our school president to be caught talking to a lowly peasant like me." Well, if Voula doesn't want to be seen as a peasant, she should probably stop going around in peasant blouses: today's is a shade of mustard that precisely matches the bathroom door.
Voula's about to flounce out, but then, seeing an opportunity to mess with Steph's head, comes back and asks if she's going to wear her hideous skankwear on photo day. This scene would have a lot more impact if Steph wasn't wearing her least revealing and most non-horrible, something-a-sane-person-might-wear outfit to date (a stripy V-neck top and a skirt that's short but far from her usual levels of traumatic indecency). Voula points out that Mama Kaye won't be too pleased if she sees what her daughter dresses like at school. This genuinely seems to be the first time that this has occurred to Steph, and Voula (for once knowing when to quit) leaves her gaping in terror at her own reflection.
In the background is another hand-drawn photo day poster (do these kids have nothing else to do with their time?), which includes a cartoony drawing of a guy all dressed up to get his picture taken. Because of his huge clowny hair, he looks like nobody so much as Rick's Bad Dad. It's rather disturbing.
Rick enters the Grade 7 classroom, to guitar music that sounds oddly like the intro to 'Everybody Wants Something'. Foreshadowing, or they just couldn't be bothered to pay someone to write more background music? You decide. Anyway, he sits down to read his motorbike magazine in peace, unaware that the Rick Fan Club is staring at him again.
"He always looks so traaagic," says Caitlin. Susie thinks it must be weird to flunk and get left behind by your friends, but Caitlin reckons Rick doesn't have any friends. No, just fangirl stalkers. "He's such a loner, and he never smiles," Caitlin complains. "I think we should help him – we should make him smile!" And a lifetime of meddling and irritating activism begins!
In the Grade 8 room, Voula is blithering about how she can't wait for photo day. L.D. says photo day is "pretty special", so she's going to wear her Castrol T-shirt, calling up mental images of Alan Partridge's funeral jacket. Seriously, what was the deal with all the Castrol merchandise they used to have in those days? That seems so weird in retrospect.
Steph comes in and mocks L.D., obviously. She's closely followed by Joey, who tells Voula that he hurt his head when "these three big guys said Stephanie was only the second-best president the school has ever had, so I had to teach them a lesson". Stephanie kind of seems to buy this story, which is pretty stupid considering she was there when he fell off his skateboard.
Raditch comes in, and immediately grabs Joey's face to check out his injuries. He seems pleased enough with how banged-up Joey is, so starts in on yet another tiresome lecture about the quality of everyone's homework. Once he's gone, Tim leans over and asks Joey what he's wearing for photo day. Joey says it'll be "a classic case of the four J's – Joey Jeremiah and his jean jacket".
Anyway, Raditch hears them talking and gives his stock rant about how socialising is not done in his class, followed with a Stinkeye Lite. He then goes back to pacing and going on about verbs, and the camera zooms in on his blackboard, where there's yet another announcement about photo day, like we might have forgotten about photo day in the ten seconds since it was last mentioned. Jeez.
That afternoon, Joey skateboards home. The house is painted a shade of red-brown that makes me unutterably sad. Inside, his oddly dishevelled mother (wearing a blue sack and some proto-Uggs) is sewing some kind of jeans-like garment. I can't see this going wrong at all. She gets all worried when she sees the cotton wool sellotaped to his head. In a sad attempt to amuse her and thus win her approval, he claims he was studying when a book jumped up and hit him in the eye (wtf?). She completely ignores this and asks if the nurse had a look at it. Who does she think bandaged him – Wheels?
Joey goes upstairs and is appalled to find that someone cleaned up his room. He comes down to complain to his mother, who says she got sick of nagging him to do it. But his precious stash of fedoras and vitamin tablets is safely boxed up in the basement, so no need to worry. Joey, ungrateful punk that he is, whines about invasions of his privacy, and even tries complaining to his dad, who just laughs at him. You can tell Dad is a Good Sort, because he's doing the washing-up and wearing an apron.
Joey's already gearing up for a Category 4 tantrum, and then realises what his mom's been doing the whole time: she's patching his jeans with a piece of his favourite jacket. His parents say they bought him a new one, but apparently wearing a new jacket makes you look like a "broomhead" and they have to be broken in. And Thursday, in case you hadn't heard, is photo day! And we hit Category 5…. now. "You know what this is?" wails Joey. "Child abuse!" Yeah, it turns out child abuse can take many forms, including housework. Who knew?
Joey runs upstairs, and his parents for some reason don't burst into hysterical laughter, which would totally be my reaction.
Next morning. Rick cycles into school, and announces his arrival by tooting an extremely high-pitched horn. Which completely kills any sort of biker badass cred he might have had previously. Tragic abuse victim Joey is rambling at Tim about how he hates the brutal housecleaning savages who gave him life. "Parents are a real pain," mumbles Tim with the air of someone who's well-versed in pretending to listen to another person's rants while actually thinking about something else altogether.
"It's child abuse, is what it is!" says Joey. "It took me months to get that jacket right, and then they go and ruin it! Now I've got nothing to wear for photo day!" The menion of child abuse gets Rick's attention, and he tells Joey that he could sell him one of his jackets. "Like, used and everything?" asks Joey. "Everything I've got's used," says Rick in a sad, wistful voice, but Joey doubts the extent of Rick's poverty, and says he wants to see the jacket first.
"So come and see it," says Rick. "What?? To your place?" Joey exclaims. Jeez, Joey, if a poor kid asks you over to their house, the polite thing to do is not recoil in fright. If Rick's offended at this, he doesn't show it, and just tells Joey to meet him after school. After a second's terrified hesitation, Joey says, "All right. Thanks, buddy!" This, however, does cause offense: Rick calls him back to say, "Just 'cause you're buying my jacket doesn't make us 'buddies', OK?" He says the word "buddies" with a depth of scorn that's a little frightening in one so young. Luckily, Joey's interpersonal skills are so limited (probably because of his tragic history of abuse) that he doesn't understand he's being brutally rebuffed until some time later.
A little later, Susie and Caitlin are lying in wait in the hallway. Rick strides manfully past. "Rick!" Susie calls. He turns around with a vaguely suspicious look. "I've got a joke for you," she says. "It's really funny. Why did the turtle cross the road?" Rick doesn't even shrug, more twitches his arms in a sort of lukewarm pastiche of a shrug. Alex is listening in disgust from behind him. "Because it was the chicken's day off!" Caitlin answers. Both girls do some kind of stupid hand-flourish. Rick gives this joke the response it deserves, viz., he turns around stony-faced and walks off.
In the classroom, Voula is minding her own business when a terrifying apparition looms up behind her. It's Steph with her wheedling face on, wearing the halterneck collared shirt from a couple episodes back. A random selection of her hair is pulled up messily in a huge clip, in a style that appears over and over again in this show and consistently looks ridiculous. Also, Snake is in the background, and I'm 90% sure his Hawaiian shirt is made from the same fabric as her top.
"I need your advice," she tells Voula. You know what's coming, don't you? "I wouldn't presume to offer advice to someone as important as our school president," Voula snaps ritualistically. Stephanie is getting less and less patient with this, just like the audience. "Come on! We used to be best friends! I still want to be." She mumbles the last bit like she's mildly ashamed of it. Friendship is for squares!
Voula reluctantly turns around in a way that suggests she's prepared to listen. She's leaning on a huge book called "Drama IV", presumably a guide to dealing with drama queens such as a certain school president I could mention. Anyway, Steph explains her problem: if she gets her photo taken (on photo day) in home clothes, everyone will laugh. (Not an argument that'll win much sympathy from Voula, who's forced to dress like a 19th-century peasant because it fits with her father's vision of a socialist utopia.) But if she wears hideous skankwear, her mother will do the responsible thing and ground her forever (for which the general population of Toronto would be deeply grateful).
Voula weighs it up for a moment, then chirpily declares, "Its your problem!" and goes back to drawing up the latest party manifesto. Steph looks utterly bereft, like talking to Voula was her last, last hope, and there is now absolutely no way around this problem, such as wearing something that isn't convent-wear or in violation of local obscenity laws. OK, maybe she is stupid after all.
After school, Joey's waiting for Rick by the bike racks, and sits on his bike for a second. He then notices Rick watching him with arms folded and a very unimpressed look on his face (although what's new?) and Rick has actually got quite muscular arms. Joey leaps off the bike pretty sharpish. "Let's go," Rick snaps. "Come with me!" Joey whispers frantically to Tim, but Tim's having none of it. Off they go.
They arrive on a normal-looking city street, although Joey's looking around like he expects to get knifed any second. Going around in that stupid Hawaiian shirt and beret combo isn't a good way to prevent that. They get to the door of Rick's apartment, but the sound quality is so terrible that it's impossible to hear what they say.
Anyway, they go inside and up the stairs; Rick complains about how slow Joey is, then jogs up the stairs, his hair bouncing hilariously with each step. The carpet is one of those greeny-brown ones with a pattern of cabbages that old people always have in the good sitting room, along with a giant painting of the Virgin Mary and a matched pair of china dogs by the fireplace.
Joey's impressed by the moderate messiness of Rick's living room. "I like this place! Your mom must be real cool." "I don't have a mom," says Rick matter-of-factly. Joey flinches, for once actually realising when he's made a massive faux pas. Rick goes over to the fridge and gets himself a Coke, then turns to see Joey staring at him with a look of sheer unadulterated fear. "Do you want a pop or something?" asks Rick, in a vague effort to defuse the situation. "Yeah! Sure!" says Joey nervously. Rick shoves the last remaining Coke at him and goes to get the jacket out of the wardrobe so he can be rid of this weirdo.
Joey drifts over to admire a very grim-looking poster of a motorbike on the wall. "I've been on one of those," says Rick. "My brother Frank's got one. He takes me driving on it sometimes. When he gets it going real fast, it's like nothing can stop you. Like nothing matters any more." Joey looks briefly moved, but then both guys remember that talking about one's feelings is unmanly, and the moment's over.
Rick gives Joey the jacket. "This used to be Frank's," he explains. "Does Frank live here too?" asks Joey as he puts the jacket on. "He moved out," Rick explains, only, being Canadian, he pronounces it more like… oewt? Sirens wail in the background again, to remind you of the squalid working-classness of the boys' surroundings, and speaking of misery, here comes Rick's Bad Dad.
Joey actually tries to be polite, holding out his hand and introducing himself, but RBD ignores him. "Wouldn't believe the day I've had," he groans, then goes over to the fridge to look for… a Coke? I suppose if he wanted a beer, that would cross the line into parental alcoholism, which is reserved for a whole nother episode and an altogether less sympathetic character.
Rick can tell what's coming and he tries to bundle Joey towards the door. Joey asks about paying for the jacket, but Rick says they'll talk about it tomorrow and Joey really needs to go now. RBD doesn't notice this exchange, and complains that he had "something to drink" in the fridge (it's very obviously Coke, but actually mentioning the brand would be too blatant?). When he sees that Joey and Rick were drinking the last Cokes, he loses it. "You're asking for trouble, is what you're doing. You think we can afford to give stuff to every little punk you know? You wanna start bringing home a paycheque!"
Joey finally gets the hint around the point RBD starts smacking Rick in the face, and runs out the door. We can hear the world's most savage beating taking place inside the apartment. Out on the street, the cogs inside Joey's brain start to turn very slowly. "Wow, Rick's dad sure is an asshole. I wonder if he tidies Rick's room too?"
Back in the apartment, a freshly bruised Rick locks himself in his room and sits down on the bed to cry, while his dad yells insincere apologies outside. The scene is pretty damn sad, but its gravitas is undercut by the terrible, terrible musical accompaniment (a very shoddy synth clarinet).
After the commercial break (how I desperately wish the DVDs could have included some '80s commercials), we see some guys outside the school pulling some camera equipment out of the back of a van. Can it be? Photo day has finally arrived!
Joey skateboards up to Tim, who compliments his new jacket. Tim is wearing a keyboard-tie. "So, it went ok?" he asks. "He was cool?" Joey replies incredibly insincerely, "Yeah. Sure. He was cool." AAAAUGH Wheels is wearing those disgustingly tight corduroy pants again. Speaking of Wheels – how come Joey's had a different best friend in every episode so far?
In the school library, the photographer is at work. Everyone's queuing outside. Alexa's wearing a baggy orange satin jumpsuit with an enormous collar that makes her look like an evil alien queen. Voula's wearing her Austin Powers shirt again, and dear lord it is just spectacularly awful. She's also draped a cardigan over her shoulders, granny-style, like she doesn't even have the courage of her horrible fashion convictions. Steph arrives in a mint-green miniskirt and a pink boob tube that just doesn't fit her, being simultaneously too short and too wide.
"I've decided I have to be me," Steph announces proudly to Voula. Voula smirks. "Very sophisticated! I'd like to see your mother's face when she sees the pictures!" Steph looks freaked out all over again, like she forgot about this problem since she last talked it over with Voula, 24 hours ago.
The photographing continues inside the library. Melanie freaks out because she's got a zit on her forehead. What, even after she took all those vitamins? Caitlin is wearing one of her trademark headbands for the first time, and it already looks stupid. Melanie sits down in front of the camera and pulls her hair down so it covers most of her face, but apparently the cameraman doesn't give a crap, and just takes her photo anyway. One of the twins is trying really hard not to laugh at her.
Rick is next up. He goes to sit on the stool, and Susie and Caitlin stand literally like a foot away from him. Subtle and not at all intimidating! The cameraman tactfully arranges Rick's face so his massive bruises are facing sort of away from the camera.
Speaking of tact: Joey, who has just been staring at Rick with his bruised face and all, turns around to Tim and asks, "What would you do if you knew someone who was getting beat up all the time by his dad?" "Who?" asks Tim. "It's just a question," Joey says, and then goes back to staring fixedly at Rick. With his bruised face and all.
"Smile, please!" orders the cameraman. Rick just stares at him with a look of absolute heartbreaking misery. The cameraman tells him to smile again, then gives up and takes the photo anyway. Rick's incredibly unperceptive fangirls giggle fangirlishly to each other at this.
When the Grade Sevens are marched out of the room, Rick goes over to Joey and demands his money. Joey's five dollars short, though, and Rick demands the jacket back. Joey begs and pleads with him not to take the jacket, lest he look like a broomhead (I think that battle was lost long ago, actually). Rick really doesn't care, but eventually agrees to let Joey give him the rest of the money after school, and stomps off.
Joey, the King of Subtlety, yells after him, "Rick? Do you wanna talk about last night?" …Yeah, seriously. Whatever the situation, you never shout that at anyone in public. It will not instil in them a desire to talk about last night. And if you're a guy shouting this at another guy in the aggressively heteronormative environment of a 1980s junior high, this goes double. "Mind your own business," snaps Rick. Joey doesn't want to let it go, but Rick tells him to shut up, and he eventually does.
Spike gets her photo taken – she's wearing her usual punk hairdo, with a very demure blouse and an actual blazer. Sometimes stylistic incongruity in an outfit is cool and ironic, and sometimes it's just incongruous. This is one of the latter times.
Voula gets hers taken, and then it's the turn of Steph, who's looking at the camera like it might steal her soul. Silly Steph! Doesn't she know she has no soul? Eventually, she mans up and sits on the stool, frantically hitching up her boob tube, and the guy takes her photo. There's a quick, menacing close-up of the camera lens, and it looks eerily like a beigy version of HAL.
Back to probably the worst subplot of this whole series: Caitlin and Susie are out in the hall, putting on plastic pig-noses. Yeah, I know. Even Caitlin is aware that Rick might not find this funny, but Susie insists, "Of course he'll think it's funny!" When Rick appears, the girls oink at him.
Let's just say he doesn't think it's funny.
Not because he has a tragic life, but because it isn't funny. At all.
He shoots them a pitying look, shakes his head, and walks off. Shane and Alex watch with looks of stunned disgust on their faces; they couldn't look more appalled if the girls were wearing real pigs' noses from pigs they'd slaughtered for the purpose.
In Mr Raditch's room, the kids are sitting through a class on "confusing words". Tim's been mulling over Joey's feeble efforts at obfuscation, and finally leans over to him (a scene from the credits!) and whispers, "This guy getting beat up by his dad – it's Rick, isn't it?" Joey insists it's just some theoretical kid called Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabadu, but Tim keeps pestering him, and eventually an apparently PMSing Raditch snaps and lectures them AGAIN on how his classroom is for learning, not socialising, blah blah blah, and sends Joey off to see the principal. Joey stomps off, giving Tim a filthy look on his way out.
Later, Joey comes out of Mr Lawrence's office. On his way past Doris's desk, he gets an idea. Because he doesn't learn from experience, he asks her the same question about "What if some guy was getting beat up by his dad?" Doris sort of jumps down his throat looking for details, and Joey panics and says he's only asking "in case I ever run into someone like that". Heh. Doris asks if everything's ok at home, and Joey gets a deer-in-the-headlights look in his eyes and mumbles, "More or less, I mean… Parents, right?" and literally runs away. So you really can't judge Doris too harshly for promptly phoning Children's Aid.
After school, Rick is waiting for Joey, and reminds him that he still owes him five dollars. Joey's starting to look perpetually terrified at this point, but faintly tells Rick to come over to his place for the money. Tim watches them go, and so does the Rick Fan Club. For some reason Tim has tucked his trousers into his socks as if he was going rat-catching. It looks stupider than that sounds.
On the way to Joey's house, Rick's bike chain comes off. Joey says they can fix it at his house. They walk on awkwardly, and find a huge motorbike parked outside Joey's house. Rick says it's not as cool as the bike of his godlike brother Frank, but "not bad" all the same.
Inside the house, Joey's parents are having espressos and tiny snacks with some dude who has, hands-down, the lousiest hairdo in this show. The back and sides are cut short, but the top is long and has been spikily back-combed to an enormous size and dyed blonde. He looks like he has a huge sea anemone growing out of his head. His motorbike helmet is on the coffee table, which is almost certainly bad table manners.
Joey's dad is bitching that they've raised four kids and nobody's ever accused them of child abuse before, "although I can say there've been times I've felt like it!" Strained laughter all around. Yeah, reeeeally not a joke you should make to a social worker who's investigating you for child abuse.
The boys come in, and Joey's mother introduces Anemone Guy as Mr Somebody from Children's Aid. AG shakes hands with Joey and gets down to business: "This afternoon you told your school secretary about a father beating a child…" Joey insists that his parents never hit him and he got his black eye from falling into some bikes. Rick looks extremely shifty and starts backing towards the door. "Who are you talking about, Joey?" asks AG, staring fixedly at Rick. "Because if it's true, he needs help very badly. Even if he won't admit it!" The last part is yelled out the door at the departing figure of Rick.
Outside, Rick tries to escape on his bike but is thwarted by his gammy chain. Anemone Guy comes out the door and fixes him with another creepy stare. "Do you want a hand with that?" he asks. He has a really weird voice that sounds like he's speaking through a cardboard tube.
Inside the house, we see Joey and his parents crowding at the front window to spy on this little tableau. Classy behaviour, people.
Rick insists that he doesn't need help (ooh, symbolic!) but AG goes to his motorbike and fishes out some kind of bike-chain-attacher, which he uses to attach the bike chain. "I can get a court order if I need to," he says casually, out of nowhere. To fix the bike?
"Do you get a bonus for every kid you bag or something?" asks Rick. "No!" says AG, completely talking over Rick. "But the kid gets help."
Bike fixed, Rick cycles off, but AG isn't done with him. "I'd like to talk to you," he calls. And it looks really creepy, because he's sort of crouching down behind a bush as he says it, and we all know to avoid guys like that. Rick, not unreasonably, tells him to leave him alone. There's some emotionally overwrought bickering, everyone questions everyone else's motives, and AG insists he can help Rick, and asks if there's someone non-brutal who Rick can stay with.
Next morning, Rick's waiting for Joey in the corridor. He asks him for the five dollars, and Joey swears to him that he didn't say anything about Rick getting beaten up. Rick just wants the money, and Joey gives it to him and scuttles off to his locker and the soothing familiarity of his BUSTS poster.
After a second, Rick comes over to Joey again and says that he's going to go live with Frank for a while, and that Joey can come visit some time. Joey seems happy at this news, but possibly he's just relieved that Rick hasn't come to kill him. "So, see you around?" he asks nervously. Rick takes off Joey's beret and tosses it back to him. "See you around, buddy!" he replies. With a huge, extremely gap-toothed grin.
Rick's creepy meddling stalkers, Caitlin and Suzie, are watching as always. "Suzie," says Caitlin, "he's smiling! He's smiling!" The girls are delighted, and will no doubt go on to write lots of Rick/Joey slash. The credits roll over an incredibly unflattering image of Rick's toothy grin. Dude, I'm glad you're not being beat up any more, but please put those teeth away.
Dubious lessons of the week: Working-class parents beat their kids, unlike middle-class ones. If someone you know is being beaten up, you don't need to figure out what to do – just bumble around ineptly for a while, and eventually someone smarter than you will realise what's going on. Despite what you might think, if your parents tidy your room and fix your clothes that probably doesn't count as abuse.
Anyway, Rick's dad comes in, looking for his tie. Rick's dad has some of the worst grownup hair on this show (although the actual worst comes later in this episode). Combining two deeply wrong hairstyles, it's huge and fluffy like clown hair, and it's also a mullet. He spots Rick's magazine and asks where he got it, and if "Frank" gave it to him. We get the impression that he would definitely not see this as a good thing.
Rick's well aware of this, and says that he bought the magazine. His dad accuses him of stealing it, but Rick says he bought it with money he got for recycling some bottles. His dad starts lecturing him about how they don't have money to waste on stuff like this, while some kind of train or something goes by, in the next room by the sound of it, just in case you'd forgotten it was a working-class neighbourhood.
Rick's Bad Dad complains that he had "plans" for that money, and mumbles something that sounds like "get out of town with it". Rick's pretty sceptical about the idea that you could get out of town with the proceeds of recycling your bottles, but it seems Bad Dad really doesn't like it when people knock his ridiculous ambitions.
He comes over to Rick, his eyes all bulgy. "Don't you ever talk back to me again!" he says. Then he hits Rick. Then conveniently holds him still so the camera can pan over his bruises from previous beatings. Well, that's depressing.
Hey, it's the inappropriately cheerful opening credits! That'll cheer us up! Forget about the miserable squalid scene of child abuse you just saw!
Outside the school. Rick cycles up to the bike racks, accompanied by guitar music that might have passed for vaguely punky and rebellious once upon a time, and definitely doesn't now, but at least it's a change from the synth kazoo horror of last episode. His bike is some weird thing with a tiny front wheel, and it also has those little rear-view mirrors sticking up from the handlebars like on a motorbike, which is sort of cute.
Joey is dicking around on his skateboard, and for some reason he's going for a French beatnik vibe this episode, having spiced up his usual rotation of fedoras with the addition of a black beret. He's so busy showing off that he crashes into some purposeless concrete obstacle and lands face-first in the grass. Susie and Caitlin watch aghast, as does Stephanie, who's still in her morning burqa. Not that they actually move to do anything. Mr Raditch rushes over, but is disappointed when he realises that Joey's actually pretty much fine, except for a black eye and some stage blood on his forehead. He tells him to go see the nurse, then report to Mr Lawrence for a chastening.
When Joey's gone, Rick goes back to doing some nonspecific bike-tending. At least he got his motorbike magazine back. He's also got him a fanclub – Caitlin and Susie are staring at him from a distance. Susie says he's "sooo cute", and Caitlin distantly says, "Yeah. I hear he's on probation." It doesn't sound like that enhances his appeal for her. In a sweeping moment of judgmentalness, she decides that he's on probation for beating people up, because "he's always got lots of bruises". Bitch.
(I should warn you that I adore Rick, in a wholesome, maternal way, and I won't hear a word said against him. Plus, way to spectacularly misjudge the situation, Caitlin.)
Joey arrives at Mr Lawrence's office, apparently wearing some cotton wool taped to his head with the brown sellotape you use for parcels. Doris the School Secretary asks him what happened, and he claims he was rescuing a kid from being beaten up. FORESHADOWING OMG.
Doris isn't buying any of this BS, and calls his bluff by asking if he's here for a commendation. Joey admits that he's been sent to see Mr Lawrence. She calls the principal on his intercom, and his creepy disembodied voice sighs, "Send him in." Mr Lawrence sounds as if he's weary of life. But so might you, if you had to deal with Joey on a regular basis.
Once Joey's out of the way, Doris goes on the PA to make an announcement: it's photo day on Thursday, and they should all try to dress their best "for a change". Helpfully, we also see a poster repeating the same information. Wow, I wonder if photo day might have some importance to the plot later on? Steph and Spike are walking down the hallway chatting. I can't tell if their horrible awkwardness is intentional because those characters aren't friends, or just due to bad acting.
Anyway, Steph weasels away and goes into the Bathroom of Skanky Transformations. While she's enacting said transformation, Voula comes out of one of the cubicles. Steph tries to say hello, but Voula manages to say hello back in a way that's even colder than ignoring her would have been.
Steph grudgingly apologises for her general crappy electoral behaviour and asks if Voula's ever going to forgive her. I'd say the answer is no, because all Voula says is "You'd better watch out, Stephanie. It wouldn't look good for our school president to be caught talking to a lowly peasant like me." Well, if Voula doesn't want to be seen as a peasant, she should probably stop going around in peasant blouses: today's is a shade of mustard that precisely matches the bathroom door.
Voula's about to flounce out, but then, seeing an opportunity to mess with Steph's head, comes back and asks if she's going to wear her hideous skankwear on photo day. This scene would have a lot more impact if Steph wasn't wearing her least revealing and most non-horrible, something-a-sane-person-might-wear outfit to date (a stripy V-neck top and a skirt that's short but far from her usual levels of traumatic indecency). Voula points out that Mama Kaye won't be too pleased if she sees what her daughter dresses like at school. This genuinely seems to be the first time that this has occurred to Steph, and Voula (for once knowing when to quit) leaves her gaping in terror at her own reflection.
In the background is another hand-drawn photo day poster (do these kids have nothing else to do with their time?), which includes a cartoony drawing of a guy all dressed up to get his picture taken. Because of his huge clowny hair, he looks like nobody so much as Rick's Bad Dad. It's rather disturbing.
Rick enters the Grade 7 classroom, to guitar music that sounds oddly like the intro to 'Everybody Wants Something'. Foreshadowing, or they just couldn't be bothered to pay someone to write more background music? You decide. Anyway, he sits down to read his motorbike magazine in peace, unaware that the Rick Fan Club is staring at him again.
"He always looks so traaagic," says Caitlin. Susie thinks it must be weird to flunk and get left behind by your friends, but Caitlin reckons Rick doesn't have any friends. No, just fangirl stalkers. "He's such a loner, and he never smiles," Caitlin complains. "I think we should help him – we should make him smile!" And a lifetime of meddling and irritating activism begins!
In the Grade 8 room, Voula is blithering about how she can't wait for photo day. L.D. says photo day is "pretty special", so she's going to wear her Castrol T-shirt, calling up mental images of Alan Partridge's funeral jacket. Seriously, what was the deal with all the Castrol merchandise they used to have in those days? That seems so weird in retrospect.
Steph comes in and mocks L.D., obviously. She's closely followed by Joey, who tells Voula that he hurt his head when "these three big guys said Stephanie was only the second-best president the school has ever had, so I had to teach them a lesson". Stephanie kind of seems to buy this story, which is pretty stupid considering she was there when he fell off his skateboard.
Raditch comes in, and immediately grabs Joey's face to check out his injuries. He seems pleased enough with how banged-up Joey is, so starts in on yet another tiresome lecture about the quality of everyone's homework. Once he's gone, Tim leans over and asks Joey what he's wearing for photo day. Joey says it'll be "a classic case of the four J's – Joey Jeremiah and his jean jacket".
Anyway, Raditch hears them talking and gives his stock rant about how socialising is not done in his class, followed with a Stinkeye Lite. He then goes back to pacing and going on about verbs, and the camera zooms in on his blackboard, where there's yet another announcement about photo day, like we might have forgotten about photo day in the ten seconds since it was last mentioned. Jeez.
That afternoon, Joey skateboards home. The house is painted a shade of red-brown that makes me unutterably sad. Inside, his oddly dishevelled mother (wearing a blue sack and some proto-Uggs) is sewing some kind of jeans-like garment. I can't see this going wrong at all. She gets all worried when she sees the cotton wool sellotaped to his head. In a sad attempt to amuse her and thus win her approval, he claims he was studying when a book jumped up and hit him in the eye (wtf?). She completely ignores this and asks if the nurse had a look at it. Who does she think bandaged him – Wheels?
Joey goes upstairs and is appalled to find that someone cleaned up his room. He comes down to complain to his mother, who says she got sick of nagging him to do it. But his precious stash of fedoras and vitamin tablets is safely boxed up in the basement, so no need to worry. Joey, ungrateful punk that he is, whines about invasions of his privacy, and even tries complaining to his dad, who just laughs at him. You can tell Dad is a Good Sort, because he's doing the washing-up and wearing an apron.
Joey's already gearing up for a Category 4 tantrum, and then realises what his mom's been doing the whole time: she's patching his jeans with a piece of his favourite jacket. His parents say they bought him a new one, but apparently wearing a new jacket makes you look like a "broomhead" and they have to be broken in. And Thursday, in case you hadn't heard, is photo day! And we hit Category 5…. now. "You know what this is?" wails Joey. "Child abuse!" Yeah, it turns out child abuse can take many forms, including housework. Who knew?
Joey runs upstairs, and his parents for some reason don't burst into hysterical laughter, which would totally be my reaction.
Next morning. Rick cycles into school, and announces his arrival by tooting an extremely high-pitched horn. Which completely kills any sort of biker badass cred he might have had previously. Tragic abuse victim Joey is rambling at Tim about how he hates the brutal housecleaning savages who gave him life. "Parents are a real pain," mumbles Tim with the air of someone who's well-versed in pretending to listen to another person's rants while actually thinking about something else altogether.
"It's child abuse, is what it is!" says Joey. "It took me months to get that jacket right, and then they go and ruin it! Now I've got nothing to wear for photo day!" The menion of child abuse gets Rick's attention, and he tells Joey that he could sell him one of his jackets. "Like, used and everything?" asks Joey. "Everything I've got's used," says Rick in a sad, wistful voice, but Joey doubts the extent of Rick's poverty, and says he wants to see the jacket first.
"So come and see it," says Rick. "What?? To your place?" Joey exclaims. Jeez, Joey, if a poor kid asks you over to their house, the polite thing to do is not recoil in fright. If Rick's offended at this, he doesn't show it, and just tells Joey to meet him after school. After a second's terrified hesitation, Joey says, "All right. Thanks, buddy!" This, however, does cause offense: Rick calls him back to say, "Just 'cause you're buying my jacket doesn't make us 'buddies', OK?" He says the word "buddies" with a depth of scorn that's a little frightening in one so young. Luckily, Joey's interpersonal skills are so limited (probably because of his tragic history of abuse) that he doesn't understand he's being brutally rebuffed until some time later.
A little later, Susie and Caitlin are lying in wait in the hallway. Rick strides manfully past. "Rick!" Susie calls. He turns around with a vaguely suspicious look. "I've got a joke for you," she says. "It's really funny. Why did the turtle cross the road?" Rick doesn't even shrug, more twitches his arms in a sort of lukewarm pastiche of a shrug. Alex is listening in disgust from behind him. "Because it was the chicken's day off!" Caitlin answers. Both girls do some kind of stupid hand-flourish. Rick gives this joke the response it deserves, viz., he turns around stony-faced and walks off.
In the classroom, Voula is minding her own business when a terrifying apparition looms up behind her. It's Steph with her wheedling face on, wearing the halterneck collared shirt from a couple episodes back. A random selection of her hair is pulled up messily in a huge clip, in a style that appears over and over again in this show and consistently looks ridiculous. Also, Snake is in the background, and I'm 90% sure his Hawaiian shirt is made from the same fabric as her top.
"I need your advice," she tells Voula. You know what's coming, don't you? "I wouldn't presume to offer advice to someone as important as our school president," Voula snaps ritualistically. Stephanie is getting less and less patient with this, just like the audience. "Come on! We used to be best friends! I still want to be." She mumbles the last bit like she's mildly ashamed of it. Friendship is for squares!
Voula reluctantly turns around in a way that suggests she's prepared to listen. She's leaning on a huge book called "Drama IV", presumably a guide to dealing with drama queens such as a certain school president I could mention. Anyway, Steph explains her problem: if she gets her photo taken (on photo day) in home clothes, everyone will laugh. (Not an argument that'll win much sympathy from Voula, who's forced to dress like a 19th-century peasant because it fits with her father's vision of a socialist utopia.) But if she wears hideous skankwear, her mother will do the responsible thing and ground her forever (for which the general population of Toronto would be deeply grateful).
Voula weighs it up for a moment, then chirpily declares, "Its your problem!" and goes back to drawing up the latest party manifesto. Steph looks utterly bereft, like talking to Voula was her last, last hope, and there is now absolutely no way around this problem, such as wearing something that isn't convent-wear or in violation of local obscenity laws. OK, maybe she is stupid after all.
After school, Joey's waiting for Rick by the bike racks, and sits on his bike for a second. He then notices Rick watching him with arms folded and a very unimpressed look on his face (although what's new?) and Rick has actually got quite muscular arms. Joey leaps off the bike pretty sharpish. "Let's go," Rick snaps. "Come with me!" Joey whispers frantically to Tim, but Tim's having none of it. Off they go.
They arrive on a normal-looking city street, although Joey's looking around like he expects to get knifed any second. Going around in that stupid Hawaiian shirt and beret combo isn't a good way to prevent that. They get to the door of Rick's apartment, but the sound quality is so terrible that it's impossible to hear what they say.
Anyway, they go inside and up the stairs; Rick complains about how slow Joey is, then jogs up the stairs, his hair bouncing hilariously with each step. The carpet is one of those greeny-brown ones with a pattern of cabbages that old people always have in the good sitting room, along with a giant painting of the Virgin Mary and a matched pair of china dogs by the fireplace.
Joey's impressed by the moderate messiness of Rick's living room. "I like this place! Your mom must be real cool." "I don't have a mom," says Rick matter-of-factly. Joey flinches, for once actually realising when he's made a massive faux pas. Rick goes over to the fridge and gets himself a Coke, then turns to see Joey staring at him with a look of sheer unadulterated fear. "Do you want a pop or something?" asks Rick, in a vague effort to defuse the situation. "Yeah! Sure!" says Joey nervously. Rick shoves the last remaining Coke at him and goes to get the jacket out of the wardrobe so he can be rid of this weirdo.
Joey drifts over to admire a very grim-looking poster of a motorbike on the wall. "I've been on one of those," says Rick. "My brother Frank's got one. He takes me driving on it sometimes. When he gets it going real fast, it's like nothing can stop you. Like nothing matters any more." Joey looks briefly moved, but then both guys remember that talking about one's feelings is unmanly, and the moment's over.
Rick gives Joey the jacket. "This used to be Frank's," he explains. "Does Frank live here too?" asks Joey as he puts the jacket on. "He moved out," Rick explains, only, being Canadian, he pronounces it more like… oewt? Sirens wail in the background again, to remind you of the squalid working-classness of the boys' surroundings, and speaking of misery, here comes Rick's Bad Dad.
Joey actually tries to be polite, holding out his hand and introducing himself, but RBD ignores him. "Wouldn't believe the day I've had," he groans, then goes over to the fridge to look for… a Coke? I suppose if he wanted a beer, that would cross the line into parental alcoholism, which is reserved for a whole nother episode and an altogether less sympathetic character.
Rick can tell what's coming and he tries to bundle Joey towards the door. Joey asks about paying for the jacket, but Rick says they'll talk about it tomorrow and Joey really needs to go now. RBD doesn't notice this exchange, and complains that he had "something to drink" in the fridge (it's very obviously Coke, but actually mentioning the brand would be too blatant?). When he sees that Joey and Rick were drinking the last Cokes, he loses it. "You're asking for trouble, is what you're doing. You think we can afford to give stuff to every little punk you know? You wanna start bringing home a paycheque!"
Joey finally gets the hint around the point RBD starts smacking Rick in the face, and runs out the door. We can hear the world's most savage beating taking place inside the apartment. Out on the street, the cogs inside Joey's brain start to turn very slowly. "Wow, Rick's dad sure is an asshole. I wonder if he tidies Rick's room too?"
Back in the apartment, a freshly bruised Rick locks himself in his room and sits down on the bed to cry, while his dad yells insincere apologies outside. The scene is pretty damn sad, but its gravitas is undercut by the terrible, terrible musical accompaniment (a very shoddy synth clarinet).
After the commercial break (how I desperately wish the DVDs could have included some '80s commercials), we see some guys outside the school pulling some camera equipment out of the back of a van. Can it be? Photo day has finally arrived!
Joey skateboards up to Tim, who compliments his new jacket. Tim is wearing a keyboard-tie. "So, it went ok?" he asks. "He was cool?" Joey replies incredibly insincerely, "Yeah. Sure. He was cool." AAAAUGH Wheels is wearing those disgustingly tight corduroy pants again. Speaking of Wheels – how come Joey's had a different best friend in every episode so far?
In the school library, the photographer is at work. Everyone's queuing outside. Alexa's wearing a baggy orange satin jumpsuit with an enormous collar that makes her look like an evil alien queen. Voula's wearing her Austin Powers shirt again, and dear lord it is just spectacularly awful. She's also draped a cardigan over her shoulders, granny-style, like she doesn't even have the courage of her horrible fashion convictions. Steph arrives in a mint-green miniskirt and a pink boob tube that just doesn't fit her, being simultaneously too short and too wide.
"I've decided I have to be me," Steph announces proudly to Voula. Voula smirks. "Very sophisticated! I'd like to see your mother's face when she sees the pictures!" Steph looks freaked out all over again, like she forgot about this problem since she last talked it over with Voula, 24 hours ago.
The photographing continues inside the library. Melanie freaks out because she's got a zit on her forehead. What, even after she took all those vitamins? Caitlin is wearing one of her trademark headbands for the first time, and it already looks stupid. Melanie sits down in front of the camera and pulls her hair down so it covers most of her face, but apparently the cameraman doesn't give a crap, and just takes her photo anyway. One of the twins is trying really hard not to laugh at her.
Rick is next up. He goes to sit on the stool, and Susie and Caitlin stand literally like a foot away from him. Subtle and not at all intimidating! The cameraman tactfully arranges Rick's face so his massive bruises are facing sort of away from the camera.
Speaking of tact: Joey, who has just been staring at Rick with his bruised face and all, turns around to Tim and asks, "What would you do if you knew someone who was getting beat up all the time by his dad?" "Who?" asks Tim. "It's just a question," Joey says, and then goes back to staring fixedly at Rick. With his bruised face and all.
"Smile, please!" orders the cameraman. Rick just stares at him with a look of absolute heartbreaking misery. The cameraman tells him to smile again, then gives up and takes the photo anyway. Rick's incredibly unperceptive fangirls giggle fangirlishly to each other at this.
When the Grade Sevens are marched out of the room, Rick goes over to Joey and demands his money. Joey's five dollars short, though, and Rick demands the jacket back. Joey begs and pleads with him not to take the jacket, lest he look like a broomhead (I think that battle was lost long ago, actually). Rick really doesn't care, but eventually agrees to let Joey give him the rest of the money after school, and stomps off.
Joey, the King of Subtlety, yells after him, "Rick? Do you wanna talk about last night?" …Yeah, seriously. Whatever the situation, you never shout that at anyone in public. It will not instil in them a desire to talk about last night. And if you're a guy shouting this at another guy in the aggressively heteronormative environment of a 1980s junior high, this goes double. "Mind your own business," snaps Rick. Joey doesn't want to let it go, but Rick tells him to shut up, and he eventually does.
Spike gets her photo taken – she's wearing her usual punk hairdo, with a very demure blouse and an actual blazer. Sometimes stylistic incongruity in an outfit is cool and ironic, and sometimes it's just incongruous. This is one of the latter times.
Voula gets hers taken, and then it's the turn of Steph, who's looking at the camera like it might steal her soul. Silly Steph! Doesn't she know she has no soul? Eventually, she mans up and sits on the stool, frantically hitching up her boob tube, and the guy takes her photo. There's a quick, menacing close-up of the camera lens, and it looks eerily like a beigy version of HAL.
Back to probably the worst subplot of this whole series: Caitlin and Susie are out in the hall, putting on plastic pig-noses. Yeah, I know. Even Caitlin is aware that Rick might not find this funny, but Susie insists, "Of course he'll think it's funny!" When Rick appears, the girls oink at him.
Let's just say he doesn't think it's funny.
Not because he has a tragic life, but because it isn't funny. At all.
He shoots them a pitying look, shakes his head, and walks off. Shane and Alex watch with looks of stunned disgust on their faces; they couldn't look more appalled if the girls were wearing real pigs' noses from pigs they'd slaughtered for the purpose.
In Mr Raditch's room, the kids are sitting through a class on "confusing words". Tim's been mulling over Joey's feeble efforts at obfuscation, and finally leans over to him (a scene from the credits!) and whispers, "This guy getting beat up by his dad – it's Rick, isn't it?" Joey insists it's just some theoretical kid called Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabadu, but Tim keeps pestering him, and eventually an apparently PMSing Raditch snaps and lectures them AGAIN on how his classroom is for learning, not socialising, blah blah blah, and sends Joey off to see the principal. Joey stomps off, giving Tim a filthy look on his way out.
Later, Joey comes out of Mr Lawrence's office. On his way past Doris's desk, he gets an idea. Because he doesn't learn from experience, he asks her the same question about "What if some guy was getting beat up by his dad?" Doris sort of jumps down his throat looking for details, and Joey panics and says he's only asking "in case I ever run into someone like that". Heh. Doris asks if everything's ok at home, and Joey gets a deer-in-the-headlights look in his eyes and mumbles, "More or less, I mean… Parents, right?" and literally runs away. So you really can't judge Doris too harshly for promptly phoning Children's Aid.
After school, Rick is waiting for Joey, and reminds him that he still owes him five dollars. Joey's starting to look perpetually terrified at this point, but faintly tells Rick to come over to his place for the money. Tim watches them go, and so does the Rick Fan Club. For some reason Tim has tucked his trousers into his socks as if he was going rat-catching. It looks stupider than that sounds.
On the way to Joey's house, Rick's bike chain comes off. Joey says they can fix it at his house. They walk on awkwardly, and find a huge motorbike parked outside Joey's house. Rick says it's not as cool as the bike of his godlike brother Frank, but "not bad" all the same.
Inside the house, Joey's parents are having espressos and tiny snacks with some dude who has, hands-down, the lousiest hairdo in this show. The back and sides are cut short, but the top is long and has been spikily back-combed to an enormous size and dyed blonde. He looks like he has a huge sea anemone growing out of his head. His motorbike helmet is on the coffee table, which is almost certainly bad table manners.
Joey's dad is bitching that they've raised four kids and nobody's ever accused them of child abuse before, "although I can say there've been times I've felt like it!" Strained laughter all around. Yeah, reeeeally not a joke you should make to a social worker who's investigating you for child abuse.
The boys come in, and Joey's mother introduces Anemone Guy as Mr Somebody from Children's Aid. AG shakes hands with Joey and gets down to business: "This afternoon you told your school secretary about a father beating a child…" Joey insists that his parents never hit him and he got his black eye from falling into some bikes. Rick looks extremely shifty and starts backing towards the door. "Who are you talking about, Joey?" asks AG, staring fixedly at Rick. "Because if it's true, he needs help very badly. Even if he won't admit it!" The last part is yelled out the door at the departing figure of Rick.
Outside, Rick tries to escape on his bike but is thwarted by his gammy chain. Anemone Guy comes out the door and fixes him with another creepy stare. "Do you want a hand with that?" he asks. He has a really weird voice that sounds like he's speaking through a cardboard tube.
Inside the house, we see Joey and his parents crowding at the front window to spy on this little tableau. Classy behaviour, people.
Rick insists that he doesn't need help (ooh, symbolic!) but AG goes to his motorbike and fishes out some kind of bike-chain-attacher, which he uses to attach the bike chain. "I can get a court order if I need to," he says casually, out of nowhere. To fix the bike?
"Do you get a bonus for every kid you bag or something?" asks Rick. "No!" says AG, completely talking over Rick. "But the kid gets help."
Bike fixed, Rick cycles off, but AG isn't done with him. "I'd like to talk to you," he calls. And it looks really creepy, because he's sort of crouching down behind a bush as he says it, and we all know to avoid guys like that. Rick, not unreasonably, tells him to leave him alone. There's some emotionally overwrought bickering, everyone questions everyone else's motives, and AG insists he can help Rick, and asks if there's someone non-brutal who Rick can stay with.
Next morning, Rick's waiting for Joey in the corridor. He asks him for the five dollars, and Joey swears to him that he didn't say anything about Rick getting beaten up. Rick just wants the money, and Joey gives it to him and scuttles off to his locker and the soothing familiarity of his BUSTS poster.
After a second, Rick comes over to Joey again and says that he's going to go live with Frank for a while, and that Joey can come visit some time. Joey seems happy at this news, but possibly he's just relieved that Rick hasn't come to kill him. "So, see you around?" he asks nervously. Rick takes off Joey's beret and tosses it back to him. "See you around, buddy!" he replies. With a huge, extremely gap-toothed grin.
Rick's creepy meddling stalkers, Caitlin and Suzie, are watching as always. "Suzie," says Caitlin, "he's smiling! He's smiling!" The girls are delighted, and will no doubt go on to write lots of Rick/Joey slash. The credits roll over an incredibly unflattering image of Rick's toothy grin. Dude, I'm glad you're not being beat up any more, but please put those teeth away.
Dubious lessons of the week: Working-class parents beat their kids, unlike middle-class ones. If someone you know is being beaten up, you don't need to figure out what to do – just bumble around ineptly for a while, and eventually someone smarter than you will realise what's going on. Despite what you might think, if your parents tidy your room and fix your clothes that probably doesn't count as abuse.
Monday, May 4, 2009
S01 E03 - The Experiment
Mr Raditch's room. Mr Lawrence is on the intercom, asking for the caretaker to come to the broom closet with her master key. Obviously Joey hasn't got sick of locking kids in there yet. Yick is safe, though, because he's right here, getting in some last-minute Spiderman-reading before class. And Arthur's safe too, although if he wants to keep avoiding the attention of bullies, making friendly conversation with Mr Raditch about how he just got a totally funky new watch is probably not the best way to go about it.
Raditch manages to disengage himself from the conversation, and goes to the front of the class. In a doomed effort to seem cool, he's sitting on the table with his foot up on a desk and has his hands in his pockets, and he looks acutely uncomfortable.
Arthur leans over to ask Yick if he's going to basketball tryouts. Yick says yes. "This is great – just think! We could be on the same team!" Unfortunately, in his inexplicable excitement at this prospect, Yick's speaking too loudly, and Mr Raditch hears. Seizing the chance to get out of his ill-advised "cool" position, Raditch stalks down to Yick's desk, declaiming, "Mr Yick Yu, who else? Mr Yu, the Disorganised!" Which is a fair criticism as Yick has now covered his desk with several thousand random bits of paper. Raditch then proceeds to insult Yick with some kind of sports-based metaphor that I can't be bothered to repeat here, but the general point is that Yick's a deadbeat. Arthur looks deeply pained at the news that he's been wasting his time hanging out with some kid who can't even put together an efficient filing system. When Raditch has gone back to blahing about essays, Yick leans over to Arthur and whines, "He's always picking on me."
Opening credits. Give us a try at Degrassi Junior Hiiiiigh!
After class. Mr Lawrence is announcing that he'll address the whole school that afternoon in the auditorium, presumably from behind some elaborate system of screens and curtains and with a giant holographic head projected onto the stage. Arthur bumbles out of Mr Raditch's classroom and makes yet another doomed attempt to talk to Steph. She tries to get rid of him with the obligatory "I don't talk to Grade Sevens", but he ignores her and asks if she has the sports shoes he left at their mother's. Steph somehow resists the urge to bludgeon him to death with said shoes for referring to the fact that they have blood relatives in common. He then makes things worse by saying he's going to basketball tryouts because their dad used to play basketball – "It's in my blood!" Steph just tells him again to stay away from her: "If anyone finds out you're my brother, you're gonna wish you were never hatched." Arthur placidly answers, "Don't worry. No problem. See you on the weekend," but Steph is long gone and he's talking to himself. Apparently, being bullied by evil harpies is another Kobalowski trait.
And speaking of bullying: it's Joey, the most half-assed bully in the history of bullying! Today's effort: "Hey, Artie Smartie! I hear your mother recalling you!" What the hell is that even supposed to mean? Joey and Wheels then set off down the hall to jointly perv on Steph. Just another day at Degrassi Junior High.
Melanie and Kathleen come out of a classroom. "Junior high is a lot different than I thought it would be," says Melanie. "Yeah, too much homework," says Kathleen. "Not that!" says Melanie. "Parties! I thought there'd be lots of parties! Not political parties. But real parties. With music and boys and potato chips. And drugs! My mom warned me all summer: junior high is full of drugs. I haven't seen any." I think this is one of my all-time favourite speeches from this show. We were promised drugs, dammit!
Kathleen is looking scandalised, although she hasn't yet cultivated the Victorian scowl of disapproval that will be her default expression for most of the rest of the series. "You'd really try drugs?!" she asks. "Oh yeah, for sure. Wouldn't you?" says Melanie. "Um, yeah. Sure," Kathleen answers. Palpable awkwardness.
Basketball tryouts. First Snake gets the ball in the basket. Everybody claps. Then Arthur tries, but hits the ball off the rim and it bounces wildly off across the room and everybody laughs and embarrassing stuff like that is why I quit basketball in school. That and my debilitating laziness. Anyway. Shane tells Arthur that he can be Degrassi's secret weapon, by playing for the other team. Harsh!
Wait, who's this woman in charge? Is this the only time we actually see a teacher other than Mr Raditch and Ms Avery? They seem to have some kind of a gym teacher here! She puts her hand on Arthur's shoulder and tells him to relax and try again, in the sort of deep, soothing voice you normally hear on relaxation tapes. Which I personally would find more distressingly patronising than Shane's overt insults. Anyway, Arthur tries again and misses horribly. Everybody laughs. Next is Yick's turn. He gets the ball in the basket easily. High fives all round. Go Yick!
After school, Shane and Alex are Yick's new basketball groupies. Arthur catches up with Yick after the others have gone, and weedily asks him for help with basketball, if he's not too busy and doesn't find him too loathsome. Damn Stephanie has reduced him to a shell of a boy! But Yick, unlike Steph, has a soul, so of course he'll help.
Training montage, accompanied by some dreadful music played on a synth kazoo. I'm wilfully ignorant about sports, so I can't really tell if Arthur's supposed to be improving over the course of this. On the way home, Arthur apologises to Yick for getting him in trouble with Mr Raditch, but Yick says that it's not his fault, because Raditch is always picking on him. "He always gives me the same crummy marks – he doesn't even read my stuff. He's got me stereotyped. I could hand in Einstein's paper and I'd still get a D or an F." Well, probably yes, but that might be because Mr Raditch doesn't teach physics.
The boys go into some kind of low-rent diner-type place. Melanie and Kathleen are at a table inside, and Joey's at the next table with Shane and Alex, bitching about his mom's cooking. What a total rebel! Arthur and Yick get milkshakes and sit down in a corner, in front of Heather and Erica (apparently, just filling the diner with kids from the school was cheaper than finding some extras for this scene).
Arthur suggests an experiment. He'll get a paper from last year's class, Yick will copy it out in his own handwriting, and if it comes back with a worse mark than last year, they'll know Mr Raditch has it in for Yick. Yick worries that he'll recognise it, but Arthur ostentatiously does some calculations on his calculator watch and says that Raditch sees 3,000 papers a year and won't recognise this one paper of Stephanie's. Yick wants to know how Arthur can get one of the school president's old papers, but Arthur just says it's a long story and to forget he ever mentioned Steph. Yick actually goes along with this, displaying levels of incuriousness rivalled only by the castaways on Lost. He and Arthur toast their plan with milkshakes.
Back to the much more entertaining secondary plot and the kids who have some vague theoretical knowledge of how to party! Kathleen's worried about getting "hooked" if she tries drugs. "Nobody wants to get hooked," says Melanie sagely. "I mean, I don't want to be an addict, in horrible poverty with rats and lice and everything – I just want to try drugs once." The empowered young woman of today knows exactly what she wants.
Joey overhears this, and comes over into their booth. "Joey F. Jeremiah, Esquire. F for Farmacy, at your service." See, this is something of a warning sign; I would want my drugs supplied by someone with basic literacy skills. "So," he asks, "what do you want? Smoke? Draw? Pot? What's your style? Lebanese Light? Bolivian Blue? Degrassi Grass? Or the top of my line, New Zealand Zappers?"
The girls are panicked and probably quite surprised that drugs turn out to have such stupid brand names, but they don't want to look like cowards, so they agree to it. Joey says he'll see what he can do.
Casa de Kaye. Steph's wearing her home clothes; this time it's an enormous knitted sweater with what looks like reindeer on it. She's laboriously accessorising it with a Lucy-style scarf, but hides it in a panic when there's a knock on the door. Ok, seriously, what is the deal with these scarves? They're completely unobjectionable – the sort made of really thin cotton with a few sparkly threads running through it that you get off market stalls or in hippie shops. Were they somehow subversive twenty years ago? Why on earth was Steph so surprised Lucy's parents let her wear them last episode, and why is she hiding hers now? Will somebody please tell me?
Anyway, it's only Arthur at the door, so Steph takes the scarf back out of her bag and goes back to practising wrapping it around her neck. Seriously. She is just sitting at the mirror, wrapping and re-wrapping it like it's an actual skill or something. Arthur says he's there to visit their mom, and then picks up one of Steph's perfume bottles, examining it rather intently. She looks ever so slightly alarmed at that, and asks him what he wants. He puts the bottle down and asks if he can borrow one of her English essays from last year, "strictly for research purposes". She doesn't believe him, but I think she sort of likes the idea of him cheating and is relieved he didn't come over to borrow her perfume, so she gives him the essay.
Next we see Arthur skulking in a darkened alleyway with the essay under his jacket. He sneaks up to Yick's house and knocks on the window. Yick's on the phone, but hangs up as soon as Arthur knocks. Sorry, Grandma Yu – low-level fraud trumps your annual call from Vietnam.
Yick opens the front door and asks for the essay. Arthur looks around veeery cautiously and takes it out from under his jacket. Miraculously, a horde of Mounties do not leap out from the bushes and arrest both boys. Yick unfolds Steph's essay and is delighted to see that it got a B+. Shocked that Steph can get high grades? Well, just because she dresses like an insane whore and stole an election through prostitution and screws over her friends and uses her huge teeth as a flirting tool and got outrageously drunk when she had to give a speech doesn't mean she's stupid! I think we all learned a little something about stereotypes today.
Yick is in his bedroom, copying the essay out in his own writing, accompanied by a synth-kazoo cover of the school song, only this time it's sort of tarted up and evil-sounding, so you know he's doing something WRONG. For some reason, his room is full of elaborate sound equipment; maybe he is in fact the one responsible for the synth kazoo effect, and he just likes to listen to his own compositions while working.
Next day, in a slightly dodgy-looking stairwell at school. Well, actually, it's just a normal stairwell with bad lighting. Mr Lawrence is on the intercom, issuing an urgent plea for new tuba players for the music club. Melanie and Kathleen skulk down the stairs to meet Wheels and Joey. Joey's wearing some plastic kiddie sunglasses for extra drug-dealer authenticity. He's got a little compartment on the underside of his skateboard, from which he takes out a few tablets. "Is that… drugs?" asks Wheels, the least useful drug-henchman ever.
Joey ignores him and tells the girls that these are the New Zealand Zappers, and they'll be $5 each. Well, they may be mystery tablets sold out of a skateboard by an imbecilic 14-year-old who's wearing sunglasses indoors, but if the price is right… The girls are pretty stingy, or else are having an attack of common sense, so Joey has to goad them into it: "No pay, no play. No tip, no trip. No pills, no thrills." He sounds exactly like the drug dealers off those Very Special War On Drugs Episodes of various '80s cartoons, which is presumably where he got this patter from.
Anyway, his spectacular rhyming ingenuity somehow convinces them that this is the less-stupid thing to do, and they hand over the money. Wheels is watching with a look of utter horror, but obviously has no plans to intervene. Joey tells the girls that they'll be "pushing up dandy-lions" if they tell anyone where they got the pills, and then says to try them. "Instant insanity!" he promises.
When they hesitate (they haven't actually said anything all scene), he takes one of the pills himself, and promptly starts tripping. "Oh… mild… cool… very cool… mild…" he mumbles, then gathers up his henchman and leaves. Wheels anxiously helps him up the stairs.
"You can go first," says Melanie, trying to sound generous. "No, you go first!" says Kathleen. "It was your idea." And I'm sure she'd persist in telling everybody that, forever, if Melanie proceeded to OD and die horribly, because that's the way Kathleen rolls. After a bit more prevarication and mutual accusations of chickenism, they swallow the pills together.
"You feel anything?" asks Kathleen. "Oh yah… cool… very cool…" says Melanie, then rolls her head around in a vaguely druggy way, watching Kathleen out of the corner of her beady eye. Kathleen catches on. "Mild… very mild…" she sighs. Then the giggling starts.
And then three tuba players walk past, presumably on the way to the music club. Or else they've mutinied, and they're the ones the music club is now trying to replace? Sadly, we'll never know. But the girls find it hilarious.
Upstairs, Wheels has grown a conscience, conveniently after the drug-selling is complete. "Selling drugs? Are you crazy?" "They were crazy," says Joey. "Wheels, my man, have a little faith!" He pulls out a huge bottle of vitamin tablets. "I saved these kids from a life of destitution, and gave them nourishing vitamins!" That Joey, he always has kids' best interests at heart.
Mr Raditch's classroom. Melanie and Kathleen come in, laughing hysterically. He gives them an entirely justified stinkeye, and they do that fake-shutting-up thing you do when you're trying to let on that you're not really intimidated. Everyone's staring at at them, and Kathleen's actually red in the face from giggling. Raditch's moustache looks especially huge; I think he may have blow-dried it with a round hairbrush for extra body.
Yick and Arthur come in. Yick shuffles up to Raditch's desk and hands in the essay, and Raditch makes a big show of being impressed that he's handing it in early. Plagiarism is a real time-saver!
The following morning, Arthur and Yick are walking into school. Yick's worrying about Raditch finding out what they did. Arthur says, "Even if he does, it's a scientific experiment! Nothing will go wrong!" …Arthur doesn't know much about science.
Raditch is wearing a white suit that makes him look like a CIA spy unsuccessfully trying to go undercover in Havana. He hands back everybody's essays. Susie is wearing socks with gladiator sandals. Melanie's essay was "very imaginative"; B vitamins are almost as good a source of inspiration as LSD. Little-known fact. Yick gets an A- on Steph's essay. Arthur's delighted, but Yick just looks annoyed.
After school, Yick explains that if he and Steph got different marks for the same essay, it means Mr Raditch is a bad marker. Arthur says it doesn't matter, because it proves Raditch doesn't hate him. Yick says Raditch actually just thinks he's stupid, so he was overimpressed by him handing in a non-dreadful essay and gave him too good a mark. There is no pleasing some people.
Still, Yick masterfully overcomes these doubts he tells Arthur to bring him more of Steph's work. Arthur says that "once is an experiment, but twice is cheating". Actually, once was cheating, too. Twice is just cheating twice. But Yick says slightly menacingly that he has to give him more essays, because he helped Arthur to not suck at basketball. So what is he going to do if Arthur says no – break his fingers? It doesn't matter, though, because Arthur is completely spineless, so of course he'll agree to this.
Later that day, the cause of his spinelessness is in her room, painting her toenails. When Arthur knocks on the door, she hides the nail varnish, which is pointless because you can smell that stuff for an hour after you use it, but I digress. Actually, while I'm digressing, I would like to theorise that Steph is pretending her mother is stricter than she really is, because nobody in their right mind would object to a 14-year-old painting her toenails in winter, when nobody is even going to see it. Steph is just doing this so that she can feel hard-done-by. In later years, this will be refined into an art form known as being an emo kid.
Anyway, in comes Arthur. He returns the essay and then stands there, watching her paint her toenails (a slutty, slutty shade of hospital-décor pink), until she asks him what he wants. He tells her that "the experiment was successful, but the thing about experiments is that they need to be replicated". She looks at him blankly: "Replicated?" I suppose we can blame this on the nail varnish fumes.
Anyway, he gives her some brief pointers on research design, but his point is that he wants another essay. "Are you in some kind of trouble?" she asks, apparently thinking there might be loan sharks or heroin dealers who will let you pay them off with old bits of homework. When Arthur says no, she says he can't have any more essays.
And this is where Arthur discovers a spine! And promptly decides to use his powers for evil! He ever-so-subtly alludes to the fact that he doesn't tell their mother about Steph's hideous skankwear. Steph can see where this is going, and tells him, "That's blackmail!" See, she does have a vocabulary! Arthur just nods, like, "You're really not in a position to negotiate, dollface. It's this or the convent."
Next day, in the school library. Lucy is standing at a rack full of books. Joey and Wheels sleaze over to her. Joey tries to flirt with her, but she just walks away without a word. Nice. The guys busy themselves looking through the books (the one Wheels picks up has a man and woman in a passionate clinch on the cover, and Joey tries to wrest it out of his hands). Melanie and Kathleen come over, along with some background guy I've never seen before and the current Token Wheelchair Girl, and Wheels and Joey anxiously square up for a fight.
A few words on Degrassi's Token Wheelchair Girls: there is always one, who is in the background of every episode, but she changes at least twice over the course of the series. There is never more than one girl at a time. I think accusations of tokenism are justified because only the final girl actually gets a name and plotlines of her own (plotlines which are, of course, exclusively centred around the fact that she is a Wheelchair Girl), but not until Degrassi High.
Anyway, it turns out that the girls want more drugs. (Obviously Melanie's decided that being hooked and having rats and lice aren't so bad after all.) Background Guy and TWG want in on it too. Joey says he'll bring some tomorrow. "You bring the money, I'll make you funny." It'll take a lot more than some cheapass recreational drugs to make Kathleen funny.
Next day, the Stairwell of Druggitude. Mr Lawrence is on the intercom, advertising a talk on "street smarts", as a sunglass-wearing Joey counts out vitamin tablets, accompanied by ominous MIDI music. This guy already has all the street smarts he needs.
A few minutes later, in Mr Raditch's classroom, and the school junkies are giggling again. This place went downhill in no time. Raditch quiets them yet again with his Anti-Giggling Stinkeye (ably backed up by the uptight twin), and announces that everybody's essays were good, and Yick's was especially interesting. "Yes, I was impressed. Not as impressed as I was last year, when I first read this paper." Obviously he was up all night rehearsing that line.
Raditch asks how Yick got the essay, and eventually Arthur owns up. But Yick says that it was Raditch's fault (not an argument likely to get him any leniency) because he made Yick cheat by always giving him bad marks. Arthur says Raditch is bad at his job because Yick and Steph got different marks for the same paper. Raditch protests that "literature is not an exact science", which is true, but we're really not dealing with literature here, are we? To more drug-addled giggling from the New Zealand Zapper kids, Yick complains that Raditch gives people any mark he feels like, and stereotypes them. Raditch rants about "perceived imperfections in the system" and gives them both detention and demands an essay on what they did and why it was wrong. Sad music. Oh the injustice!
Later, in the diner, Steph sits down next to Joey and Wheels (absent-mindedly flashing The Teeth at Shane on the way over) and announces, "We've gotta talk." Both guys seem to think this means there will be sexy talk, although Wheels discreetly moves his drink away from Steph, probably worried that she might drunkenly throw up in it if he's not careful. Joey asks if she wants to come to the mall and help him buy new clothes – if a guy asked me that, I would think he was gently telling me I was Not His Type. Wheels sits there and ogles her in silence. Creepy.
But it turns out that Steph is not here for sexy talk or even clothes talk. "I hear you've been selling drugs," she mumbles. Cut to Kathleen and Melanie at a nearby table. "I don't care what you think," says Stephanie, "but drugs are dangerous!" Wait, is she actually displaying some sort of responsible school-president-type behaviour? How dreadfully disappointing. Joey tells her, "I wouldn't sell drugs, I wouldn't even take them. They wanted drugs so I sold them vitamin pills. They just thought they were stoned!" Melanie and Kathleen listen in horror.
Steph, who's being uncharacteristically ethical all of a sudden, chews him out for swindling the kids out of their money (so it would be better if the drugs were real?), but he tells her that "lessons don't come cheap". Actually, $5 and some public humiliation is extremely cheap, compared to the gothically Tragic Consequences that will come from drug use later on – but I'm getting several years ahead of myself. For now, Melanie and Kathleen look distinctly queasy.
Detention. Wow, Mr Raditch's hair is luxuriant. Arthur is writing but Yick is just sulkily tapping his pen on the desk, until he gets a patented Raditch Stinkeye (he'll wear that eye out if he's not careful). Someone hammers on the door, and Raditch actually wipes the chalk dust off his hands with a towelette before he goes to answer it. A little neurotic, don't you think? It's some woman at the door, asking to speak with him for a moment, with the hyper-clear diction of an actress who knows she may not get any more lines in the show, so she'd better make the most of this one.
Left alone in the classroom, the boys bemoan their lot. Yick thinks it's all Raditch's fault, but Arthur points out that there was the matter of their repeated cheating. Yick is unconvinced and decides he's not going to do the assigment because he "can't write papers". Arthur tells him to make an effort, but Yick takes offence and says not only is he not going to help Arthur with basketball any more, but Arthur is the worst player in the world and has no hope. Not no hope of success, just no hope in general, which is pretty harsh.
Arthur maintains that being crap and trying to improve is still better than cheating – hang on, wasn't the cheating his idea? He does have an impressive talent for bamboozlement, though: before Yick can point out his hypocrisy, Arthur distracts him by listing off his many faults and then claims that Raditch only thinks Yick is dumb because Yick hasn't given him any reason to think he's not. Oh, there's that spine again; this time, he's using his powers for good, but still being kind of a dick about it.
Raditch comes back in, giving them both the frowning of a lifetime just for good measure. Yick starts to write. For no particular reason, we cut to a janitor mopping the hallways, then back to Yick and Raditch in the classroom after Arthur's gone home. There is the most confusing poster on the back wall – it's headed "CONCESSION" in huge letters, as if it was a motivational poster, but the illustration is a sciency diagram of the solar system or something. What?
Anyway, Yick finishes his opus and hands it to Raditch with a Significant Look. Raditch starts to read it. It's a rather widely spaced half an A4 page, which really doesn't qualify as an essay. Plus I'm pretty sure that page has been crumpled up and flattened out several times. I'm getting more and more convinced that Raditch has a point.
Next morning, the Degrassi pill-poppers are gathered outside the school. Melanie's explaining to Token Wheelchair Girl and Background Guy that they've all been scammed.
Cut to Joey checking himself out in the two Playboy mirrors he has inside his locker. Also in there are some bits of Stephanie Kaye propaganda and a poster called "Busts", which shows about 20 different pairs of boobs in unflattering sports bras. What… what the hell? The concept may be pure sleaze, but this is in fact a thoroughly unerotic poster, like something that might be on the wall of a breast doctor's office. A more salacious person than me might speculate that that's why it's here in Joey's locker instead of at home under his mattress, but I'm not a more salacious person than me, so let's move on.
Anyway, he spots his disgruntled clientele reflected in the mirror, and turns around to see if they want "to buy some more". "Some more vitamins, huh?" asks Kathleen. Kathleen is dressed as a preppy boy today: she's wearing these very manly grey slacks, and a sweater vest with a pinstriped shirt underneath. She looks better than usual.
Kathleen and Melanie demand their money back, while Background Guy and Token Wheelchair Girl scowl menacingly. They're obviously not being paid to speak. Joey admits that he spent the money on a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, then runs for it, pursued by an angry four-person mob of vitamin junkies. Bust-ed! You see? Because of the busts? Ah, forget it.
Later, in the classroom, the kids are quietly working when Mr Raditch announces that he wants to read out an assignment that "one of them wrote". It's about how stereotyping people is wrong, and "this guy I know" apparently doesn't suck royally at basketball after all, and "this other guy I know" supposedly isn't an idiot despite appearances to the contrary. Yick, by the way, has the worst poker face in the history of anything, and is pulling an assortment of silent-movie-grade nonsensical faces while his essay is read out. Way to preserve your anonymity, Yick.
Raditch dismisses the class but calls Yick back. He tells him that the paper really deserves an A, and generously doesn't mention the fact that he assigned him a completely different topic. Yick turns to go, but Raditch asks him for a "clean slate" and for both of them to try harder, and this is apparently as close as he ever gets to offering an apology. Which is not terribly close. He even offers to stop calling him "Mr Yu the Disorganised", which is just as well, because it was the least catchy nickname ever, and I'm sure he's going home to work on something infinitely more hilarious. After a not-at-all-suspenseful period of hesitation, Yick agrees to shake on it. Happy music.
Arthur's opening his locker. Caitlin walks past in a black-and-white leopard-print catsuit of some kind. Yick arrives with his basketball, and we get a glimpse inside Arthur's locker. There's a carefully cut-out photo of a moustached basketball player, and a calendar: this month's picture is a barn owl. I would mock it, but owls are kind of nifty, and anyway I'm too busy feeling relieved that Arthur didn't also have a "Busts" poster, or its companion poster, "Asses in High-Waisted Panties".
Yick asks Arthur if he wants to go practice basketball and then go for a milkshake, if he's not too busy. He knows how to show a boy a good time. Arthur gives it a bit of thought and decides he does have time to hang out with Yick and be henpecked by his sister and cut out photos of sporting heroes. Bless.
Just then, the guys hear someone yelling from inside a broom closet. They open the door, to find Joey inside wearing nothing but his Y-fronts and his hat, which he immediately uses to cover the Y-fronts. For which I am grateful. "Drug-crazed [inaudible]s stole my clothes!" he explains – the early episodes have quite poor sound quality. The missing word might have been "zombies", or it might have been "homies", or it might have been more ludicrous made-up Canadian slang.
Anyway, Arthur and Yick cheerfully shut the door and leave him to starve. At least there does seem to be a urinal in there (or just a giant sink?), although it probably isn't connected to actual plumbing. But I guess you can't have everything.
The boys head to the exit, engaging in some very undemanding basketball-horseplay, and the credits roll.
Dubious lessons of the week: Don't buy drugs from a shady kid you don't know, because they might not really be drugs, and then where would you be? If you do decide to set up as a dealer, your skateboard is a foolproof place to hide your stash. Cheating at your schoolwork will lead to increased understanding and empathy between you and your teachers. Breasts, contrary to popular belief, are not always sexy.
Raditch manages to disengage himself from the conversation, and goes to the front of the class. In a doomed effort to seem cool, he's sitting on the table with his foot up on a desk and has his hands in his pockets, and he looks acutely uncomfortable.
Arthur leans over to ask Yick if he's going to basketball tryouts. Yick says yes. "This is great – just think! We could be on the same team!" Unfortunately, in his inexplicable excitement at this prospect, Yick's speaking too loudly, and Mr Raditch hears. Seizing the chance to get out of his ill-advised "cool" position, Raditch stalks down to Yick's desk, declaiming, "Mr Yick Yu, who else? Mr Yu, the Disorganised!" Which is a fair criticism as Yick has now covered his desk with several thousand random bits of paper. Raditch then proceeds to insult Yick with some kind of sports-based metaphor that I can't be bothered to repeat here, but the general point is that Yick's a deadbeat. Arthur looks deeply pained at the news that he's been wasting his time hanging out with some kid who can't even put together an efficient filing system. When Raditch has gone back to blahing about essays, Yick leans over to Arthur and whines, "He's always picking on me."
Opening credits. Give us a try at Degrassi Junior Hiiiiigh!
After class. Mr Lawrence is announcing that he'll address the whole school that afternoon in the auditorium, presumably from behind some elaborate system of screens and curtains and with a giant holographic head projected onto the stage. Arthur bumbles out of Mr Raditch's classroom and makes yet another doomed attempt to talk to Steph. She tries to get rid of him with the obligatory "I don't talk to Grade Sevens", but he ignores her and asks if she has the sports shoes he left at their mother's. Steph somehow resists the urge to bludgeon him to death with said shoes for referring to the fact that they have blood relatives in common. He then makes things worse by saying he's going to basketball tryouts because their dad used to play basketball – "It's in my blood!" Steph just tells him again to stay away from her: "If anyone finds out you're my brother, you're gonna wish you were never hatched." Arthur placidly answers, "Don't worry. No problem. See you on the weekend," but Steph is long gone and he's talking to himself. Apparently, being bullied by evil harpies is another Kobalowski trait.
And speaking of bullying: it's Joey, the most half-assed bully in the history of bullying! Today's effort: "Hey, Artie Smartie! I hear your mother recalling you!" What the hell is that even supposed to mean? Joey and Wheels then set off down the hall to jointly perv on Steph. Just another day at Degrassi Junior High.
Melanie and Kathleen come out of a classroom. "Junior high is a lot different than I thought it would be," says Melanie. "Yeah, too much homework," says Kathleen. "Not that!" says Melanie. "Parties! I thought there'd be lots of parties! Not political parties. But real parties. With music and boys and potato chips. And drugs! My mom warned me all summer: junior high is full of drugs. I haven't seen any." I think this is one of my all-time favourite speeches from this show. We were promised drugs, dammit!
Kathleen is looking scandalised, although she hasn't yet cultivated the Victorian scowl of disapproval that will be her default expression for most of the rest of the series. "You'd really try drugs?!" she asks. "Oh yeah, for sure. Wouldn't you?" says Melanie. "Um, yeah. Sure," Kathleen answers. Palpable awkwardness.
Basketball tryouts. First Snake gets the ball in the basket. Everybody claps. Then Arthur tries, but hits the ball off the rim and it bounces wildly off across the room and everybody laughs and embarrassing stuff like that is why I quit basketball in school. That and my debilitating laziness. Anyway. Shane tells Arthur that he can be Degrassi's secret weapon, by playing for the other team. Harsh!
Wait, who's this woman in charge? Is this the only time we actually see a teacher other than Mr Raditch and Ms Avery? They seem to have some kind of a gym teacher here! She puts her hand on Arthur's shoulder and tells him to relax and try again, in the sort of deep, soothing voice you normally hear on relaxation tapes. Which I personally would find more distressingly patronising than Shane's overt insults. Anyway, Arthur tries again and misses horribly. Everybody laughs. Next is Yick's turn. He gets the ball in the basket easily. High fives all round. Go Yick!
After school, Shane and Alex are Yick's new basketball groupies. Arthur catches up with Yick after the others have gone, and weedily asks him for help with basketball, if he's not too busy and doesn't find him too loathsome. Damn Stephanie has reduced him to a shell of a boy! But Yick, unlike Steph, has a soul, so of course he'll help.
Training montage, accompanied by some dreadful music played on a synth kazoo. I'm wilfully ignorant about sports, so I can't really tell if Arthur's supposed to be improving over the course of this. On the way home, Arthur apologises to Yick for getting him in trouble with Mr Raditch, but Yick says that it's not his fault, because Raditch is always picking on him. "He always gives me the same crummy marks – he doesn't even read my stuff. He's got me stereotyped. I could hand in Einstein's paper and I'd still get a D or an F." Well, probably yes, but that might be because Mr Raditch doesn't teach physics.
The boys go into some kind of low-rent diner-type place. Melanie and Kathleen are at a table inside, and Joey's at the next table with Shane and Alex, bitching about his mom's cooking. What a total rebel! Arthur and Yick get milkshakes and sit down in a corner, in front of Heather and Erica (apparently, just filling the diner with kids from the school was cheaper than finding some extras for this scene).
Arthur suggests an experiment. He'll get a paper from last year's class, Yick will copy it out in his own handwriting, and if it comes back with a worse mark than last year, they'll know Mr Raditch has it in for Yick. Yick worries that he'll recognise it, but Arthur ostentatiously does some calculations on his calculator watch and says that Raditch sees 3,000 papers a year and won't recognise this one paper of Stephanie's. Yick wants to know how Arthur can get one of the school president's old papers, but Arthur just says it's a long story and to forget he ever mentioned Steph. Yick actually goes along with this, displaying levels of incuriousness rivalled only by the castaways on Lost. He and Arthur toast their plan with milkshakes.
Back to the much more entertaining secondary plot and the kids who have some vague theoretical knowledge of how to party! Kathleen's worried about getting "hooked" if she tries drugs. "Nobody wants to get hooked," says Melanie sagely. "I mean, I don't want to be an addict, in horrible poverty with rats and lice and everything – I just want to try drugs once." The empowered young woman of today knows exactly what she wants.
Joey overhears this, and comes over into their booth. "Joey F. Jeremiah, Esquire. F for Farmacy, at your service." See, this is something of a warning sign; I would want my drugs supplied by someone with basic literacy skills. "So," he asks, "what do you want? Smoke? Draw? Pot? What's your style? Lebanese Light? Bolivian Blue? Degrassi Grass? Or the top of my line, New Zealand Zappers?"
The girls are panicked and probably quite surprised that drugs turn out to have such stupid brand names, but they don't want to look like cowards, so they agree to it. Joey says he'll see what he can do.
Casa de Kaye. Steph's wearing her home clothes; this time it's an enormous knitted sweater with what looks like reindeer on it. She's laboriously accessorising it with a Lucy-style scarf, but hides it in a panic when there's a knock on the door. Ok, seriously, what is the deal with these scarves? They're completely unobjectionable – the sort made of really thin cotton with a few sparkly threads running through it that you get off market stalls or in hippie shops. Were they somehow subversive twenty years ago? Why on earth was Steph so surprised Lucy's parents let her wear them last episode, and why is she hiding hers now? Will somebody please tell me?
Anyway, it's only Arthur at the door, so Steph takes the scarf back out of her bag and goes back to practising wrapping it around her neck. Seriously. She is just sitting at the mirror, wrapping and re-wrapping it like it's an actual skill or something. Arthur says he's there to visit their mom, and then picks up one of Steph's perfume bottles, examining it rather intently. She looks ever so slightly alarmed at that, and asks him what he wants. He puts the bottle down and asks if he can borrow one of her English essays from last year, "strictly for research purposes". She doesn't believe him, but I think she sort of likes the idea of him cheating and is relieved he didn't come over to borrow her perfume, so she gives him the essay.
Next we see Arthur skulking in a darkened alleyway with the essay under his jacket. He sneaks up to Yick's house and knocks on the window. Yick's on the phone, but hangs up as soon as Arthur knocks. Sorry, Grandma Yu – low-level fraud trumps your annual call from Vietnam.
Yick opens the front door and asks for the essay. Arthur looks around veeery cautiously and takes it out from under his jacket. Miraculously, a horde of Mounties do not leap out from the bushes and arrest both boys. Yick unfolds Steph's essay and is delighted to see that it got a B+. Shocked that Steph can get high grades? Well, just because she dresses like an insane whore and stole an election through prostitution and screws over her friends and uses her huge teeth as a flirting tool and got outrageously drunk when she had to give a speech doesn't mean she's stupid! I think we all learned a little something about stereotypes today.
Yick is in his bedroom, copying the essay out in his own writing, accompanied by a synth-kazoo cover of the school song, only this time it's sort of tarted up and evil-sounding, so you know he's doing something WRONG. For some reason, his room is full of elaborate sound equipment; maybe he is in fact the one responsible for the synth kazoo effect, and he just likes to listen to his own compositions while working.
Next day, in a slightly dodgy-looking stairwell at school. Well, actually, it's just a normal stairwell with bad lighting. Mr Lawrence is on the intercom, issuing an urgent plea for new tuba players for the music club. Melanie and Kathleen skulk down the stairs to meet Wheels and Joey. Joey's wearing some plastic kiddie sunglasses for extra drug-dealer authenticity. He's got a little compartment on the underside of his skateboard, from which he takes out a few tablets. "Is that… drugs?" asks Wheels, the least useful drug-henchman ever.
Joey ignores him and tells the girls that these are the New Zealand Zappers, and they'll be $5 each. Well, they may be mystery tablets sold out of a skateboard by an imbecilic 14-year-old who's wearing sunglasses indoors, but if the price is right… The girls are pretty stingy, or else are having an attack of common sense, so Joey has to goad them into it: "No pay, no play. No tip, no trip. No pills, no thrills." He sounds exactly like the drug dealers off those Very Special War On Drugs Episodes of various '80s cartoons, which is presumably where he got this patter from.
Anyway, his spectacular rhyming ingenuity somehow convinces them that this is the less-stupid thing to do, and they hand over the money. Wheels is watching with a look of utter horror, but obviously has no plans to intervene. Joey tells the girls that they'll be "pushing up dandy-lions" if they tell anyone where they got the pills, and then says to try them. "Instant insanity!" he promises.
When they hesitate (they haven't actually said anything all scene), he takes one of the pills himself, and promptly starts tripping. "Oh… mild… cool… very cool… mild…" he mumbles, then gathers up his henchman and leaves. Wheels anxiously helps him up the stairs.
"You can go first," says Melanie, trying to sound generous. "No, you go first!" says Kathleen. "It was your idea." And I'm sure she'd persist in telling everybody that, forever, if Melanie proceeded to OD and die horribly, because that's the way Kathleen rolls. After a bit more prevarication and mutual accusations of chickenism, they swallow the pills together.
"You feel anything?" asks Kathleen. "Oh yah… cool… very cool…" says Melanie, then rolls her head around in a vaguely druggy way, watching Kathleen out of the corner of her beady eye. Kathleen catches on. "Mild… very mild…" she sighs. Then the giggling starts.
And then three tuba players walk past, presumably on the way to the music club. Or else they've mutinied, and they're the ones the music club is now trying to replace? Sadly, we'll never know. But the girls find it hilarious.
Upstairs, Wheels has grown a conscience, conveniently after the drug-selling is complete. "Selling drugs? Are you crazy?" "They were crazy," says Joey. "Wheels, my man, have a little faith!" He pulls out a huge bottle of vitamin tablets. "I saved these kids from a life of destitution, and gave them nourishing vitamins!" That Joey, he always has kids' best interests at heart.
Mr Raditch's classroom. Melanie and Kathleen come in, laughing hysterically. He gives them an entirely justified stinkeye, and they do that fake-shutting-up thing you do when you're trying to let on that you're not really intimidated. Everyone's staring at at them, and Kathleen's actually red in the face from giggling. Raditch's moustache looks especially huge; I think he may have blow-dried it with a round hairbrush for extra body.
Yick and Arthur come in. Yick shuffles up to Raditch's desk and hands in the essay, and Raditch makes a big show of being impressed that he's handing it in early. Plagiarism is a real time-saver!
The following morning, Arthur and Yick are walking into school. Yick's worrying about Raditch finding out what they did. Arthur says, "Even if he does, it's a scientific experiment! Nothing will go wrong!" …Arthur doesn't know much about science.
Raditch is wearing a white suit that makes him look like a CIA spy unsuccessfully trying to go undercover in Havana. He hands back everybody's essays. Susie is wearing socks with gladiator sandals. Melanie's essay was "very imaginative"; B vitamins are almost as good a source of inspiration as LSD. Little-known fact. Yick gets an A- on Steph's essay. Arthur's delighted, but Yick just looks annoyed.
After school, Yick explains that if he and Steph got different marks for the same essay, it means Mr Raditch is a bad marker. Arthur says it doesn't matter, because it proves Raditch doesn't hate him. Yick says Raditch actually just thinks he's stupid, so he was overimpressed by him handing in a non-dreadful essay and gave him too good a mark. There is no pleasing some people.
Still, Yick masterfully overcomes these doubts he tells Arthur to bring him more of Steph's work. Arthur says that "once is an experiment, but twice is cheating". Actually, once was cheating, too. Twice is just cheating twice. But Yick says slightly menacingly that he has to give him more essays, because he helped Arthur to not suck at basketball. So what is he going to do if Arthur says no – break his fingers? It doesn't matter, though, because Arthur is completely spineless, so of course he'll agree to this.
Later that day, the cause of his spinelessness is in her room, painting her toenails. When Arthur knocks on the door, she hides the nail varnish, which is pointless because you can smell that stuff for an hour after you use it, but I digress. Actually, while I'm digressing, I would like to theorise that Steph is pretending her mother is stricter than she really is, because nobody in their right mind would object to a 14-year-old painting her toenails in winter, when nobody is even going to see it. Steph is just doing this so that she can feel hard-done-by. In later years, this will be refined into an art form known as being an emo kid.
Anyway, in comes Arthur. He returns the essay and then stands there, watching her paint her toenails (a slutty, slutty shade of hospital-décor pink), until she asks him what he wants. He tells her that "the experiment was successful, but the thing about experiments is that they need to be replicated". She looks at him blankly: "Replicated?" I suppose we can blame this on the nail varnish fumes.
Anyway, he gives her some brief pointers on research design, but his point is that he wants another essay. "Are you in some kind of trouble?" she asks, apparently thinking there might be loan sharks or heroin dealers who will let you pay them off with old bits of homework. When Arthur says no, she says he can't have any more essays.
And this is where Arthur discovers a spine! And promptly decides to use his powers for evil! He ever-so-subtly alludes to the fact that he doesn't tell their mother about Steph's hideous skankwear. Steph can see where this is going, and tells him, "That's blackmail!" See, she does have a vocabulary! Arthur just nods, like, "You're really not in a position to negotiate, dollface. It's this or the convent."
Next day, in the school library. Lucy is standing at a rack full of books. Joey and Wheels sleaze over to her. Joey tries to flirt with her, but she just walks away without a word. Nice. The guys busy themselves looking through the books (the one Wheels picks up has a man and woman in a passionate clinch on the cover, and Joey tries to wrest it out of his hands). Melanie and Kathleen come over, along with some background guy I've never seen before and the current Token Wheelchair Girl, and Wheels and Joey anxiously square up for a fight.
A few words on Degrassi's Token Wheelchair Girls: there is always one, who is in the background of every episode, but she changes at least twice over the course of the series. There is never more than one girl at a time. I think accusations of tokenism are justified because only the final girl actually gets a name and plotlines of her own (plotlines which are, of course, exclusively centred around the fact that she is a Wheelchair Girl), but not until Degrassi High.
Anyway, it turns out that the girls want more drugs. (Obviously Melanie's decided that being hooked and having rats and lice aren't so bad after all.) Background Guy and TWG want in on it too. Joey says he'll bring some tomorrow. "You bring the money, I'll make you funny." It'll take a lot more than some cheapass recreational drugs to make Kathleen funny.
Next day, the Stairwell of Druggitude. Mr Lawrence is on the intercom, advertising a talk on "street smarts", as a sunglass-wearing Joey counts out vitamin tablets, accompanied by ominous MIDI music. This guy already has all the street smarts he needs.
A few minutes later, in Mr Raditch's classroom, and the school junkies are giggling again. This place went downhill in no time. Raditch quiets them yet again with his Anti-Giggling Stinkeye (ably backed up by the uptight twin), and announces that everybody's essays were good, and Yick's was especially interesting. "Yes, I was impressed. Not as impressed as I was last year, when I first read this paper." Obviously he was up all night rehearsing that line.
Raditch asks how Yick got the essay, and eventually Arthur owns up. But Yick says that it was Raditch's fault (not an argument likely to get him any leniency) because he made Yick cheat by always giving him bad marks. Arthur says Raditch is bad at his job because Yick and Steph got different marks for the same paper. Raditch protests that "literature is not an exact science", which is true, but we're really not dealing with literature here, are we? To more drug-addled giggling from the New Zealand Zapper kids, Yick complains that Raditch gives people any mark he feels like, and stereotypes them. Raditch rants about "perceived imperfections in the system" and gives them both detention and demands an essay on what they did and why it was wrong. Sad music. Oh the injustice!
Later, in the diner, Steph sits down next to Joey and Wheels (absent-mindedly flashing The Teeth at Shane on the way over) and announces, "We've gotta talk." Both guys seem to think this means there will be sexy talk, although Wheels discreetly moves his drink away from Steph, probably worried that she might drunkenly throw up in it if he's not careful. Joey asks if she wants to come to the mall and help him buy new clothes – if a guy asked me that, I would think he was gently telling me I was Not His Type. Wheels sits there and ogles her in silence. Creepy.
But it turns out that Steph is not here for sexy talk or even clothes talk. "I hear you've been selling drugs," she mumbles. Cut to Kathleen and Melanie at a nearby table. "I don't care what you think," says Stephanie, "but drugs are dangerous!" Wait, is she actually displaying some sort of responsible school-president-type behaviour? How dreadfully disappointing. Joey tells her, "I wouldn't sell drugs, I wouldn't even take them. They wanted drugs so I sold them vitamin pills. They just thought they were stoned!" Melanie and Kathleen listen in horror.
Steph, who's being uncharacteristically ethical all of a sudden, chews him out for swindling the kids out of their money (so it would be better if the drugs were real?), but he tells her that "lessons don't come cheap". Actually, $5 and some public humiliation is extremely cheap, compared to the gothically Tragic Consequences that will come from drug use later on – but I'm getting several years ahead of myself. For now, Melanie and Kathleen look distinctly queasy.
Detention. Wow, Mr Raditch's hair is luxuriant. Arthur is writing but Yick is just sulkily tapping his pen on the desk, until he gets a patented Raditch Stinkeye (he'll wear that eye out if he's not careful). Someone hammers on the door, and Raditch actually wipes the chalk dust off his hands with a towelette before he goes to answer it. A little neurotic, don't you think? It's some woman at the door, asking to speak with him for a moment, with the hyper-clear diction of an actress who knows she may not get any more lines in the show, so she'd better make the most of this one.
Left alone in the classroom, the boys bemoan their lot. Yick thinks it's all Raditch's fault, but Arthur points out that there was the matter of their repeated cheating. Yick is unconvinced and decides he's not going to do the assigment because he "can't write papers". Arthur tells him to make an effort, but Yick takes offence and says not only is he not going to help Arthur with basketball any more, but Arthur is the worst player in the world and has no hope. Not no hope of success, just no hope in general, which is pretty harsh.
Arthur maintains that being crap and trying to improve is still better than cheating – hang on, wasn't the cheating his idea? He does have an impressive talent for bamboozlement, though: before Yick can point out his hypocrisy, Arthur distracts him by listing off his many faults and then claims that Raditch only thinks Yick is dumb because Yick hasn't given him any reason to think he's not. Oh, there's that spine again; this time, he's using his powers for good, but still being kind of a dick about it.
Raditch comes back in, giving them both the frowning of a lifetime just for good measure. Yick starts to write. For no particular reason, we cut to a janitor mopping the hallways, then back to Yick and Raditch in the classroom after Arthur's gone home. There is the most confusing poster on the back wall – it's headed "CONCESSION" in huge letters, as if it was a motivational poster, but the illustration is a sciency diagram of the solar system or something. What?
Anyway, Yick finishes his opus and hands it to Raditch with a Significant Look. Raditch starts to read it. It's a rather widely spaced half an A4 page, which really doesn't qualify as an essay. Plus I'm pretty sure that page has been crumpled up and flattened out several times. I'm getting more and more convinced that Raditch has a point.
Next morning, the Degrassi pill-poppers are gathered outside the school. Melanie's explaining to Token Wheelchair Girl and Background Guy that they've all been scammed.
Cut to Joey checking himself out in the two Playboy mirrors he has inside his locker. Also in there are some bits of Stephanie Kaye propaganda and a poster called "Busts", which shows about 20 different pairs of boobs in unflattering sports bras. What… what the hell? The concept may be pure sleaze, but this is in fact a thoroughly unerotic poster, like something that might be on the wall of a breast doctor's office. A more salacious person than me might speculate that that's why it's here in Joey's locker instead of at home under his mattress, but I'm not a more salacious person than me, so let's move on.
Anyway, he spots his disgruntled clientele reflected in the mirror, and turns around to see if they want "to buy some more". "Some more vitamins, huh?" asks Kathleen. Kathleen is dressed as a preppy boy today: she's wearing these very manly grey slacks, and a sweater vest with a pinstriped shirt underneath. She looks better than usual.
Kathleen and Melanie demand their money back, while Background Guy and Token Wheelchair Girl scowl menacingly. They're obviously not being paid to speak. Joey admits that he spent the money on a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, then runs for it, pursued by an angry four-person mob of vitamin junkies. Bust-ed! You see? Because of the busts? Ah, forget it.
Later, in the classroom, the kids are quietly working when Mr Raditch announces that he wants to read out an assignment that "one of them wrote". It's about how stereotyping people is wrong, and "this guy I know" apparently doesn't suck royally at basketball after all, and "this other guy I know" supposedly isn't an idiot despite appearances to the contrary. Yick, by the way, has the worst poker face in the history of anything, and is pulling an assortment of silent-movie-grade nonsensical faces while his essay is read out. Way to preserve your anonymity, Yick.
Raditch dismisses the class but calls Yick back. He tells him that the paper really deserves an A, and generously doesn't mention the fact that he assigned him a completely different topic. Yick turns to go, but Raditch asks him for a "clean slate" and for both of them to try harder, and this is apparently as close as he ever gets to offering an apology. Which is not terribly close. He even offers to stop calling him "Mr Yu the Disorganised", which is just as well, because it was the least catchy nickname ever, and I'm sure he's going home to work on something infinitely more hilarious. After a not-at-all-suspenseful period of hesitation, Yick agrees to shake on it. Happy music.
Arthur's opening his locker. Caitlin walks past in a black-and-white leopard-print catsuit of some kind. Yick arrives with his basketball, and we get a glimpse inside Arthur's locker. There's a carefully cut-out photo of a moustached basketball player, and a calendar: this month's picture is a barn owl. I would mock it, but owls are kind of nifty, and anyway I'm too busy feeling relieved that Arthur didn't also have a "Busts" poster, or its companion poster, "Asses in High-Waisted Panties".
Yick asks Arthur if he wants to go practice basketball and then go for a milkshake, if he's not too busy. He knows how to show a boy a good time. Arthur gives it a bit of thought and decides he does have time to hang out with Yick and be henpecked by his sister and cut out photos of sporting heroes. Bless.
Just then, the guys hear someone yelling from inside a broom closet. They open the door, to find Joey inside wearing nothing but his Y-fronts and his hat, which he immediately uses to cover the Y-fronts. For which I am grateful. "Drug-crazed [inaudible]s stole my clothes!" he explains – the early episodes have quite poor sound quality. The missing word might have been "zombies", or it might have been "homies", or it might have been more ludicrous made-up Canadian slang.
Anyway, Arthur and Yick cheerfully shut the door and leave him to starve. At least there does seem to be a urinal in there (or just a giant sink?), although it probably isn't connected to actual plumbing. But I guess you can't have everything.
The boys head to the exit, engaging in some very undemanding basketball-horseplay, and the credits roll.
Dubious lessons of the week: Don't buy drugs from a shady kid you don't know, because they might not really be drugs, and then where would you be? If you do decide to set up as a dealer, your skateboard is a foolproof place to hide your stash. Cheating at your schoolwork will lead to increased understanding and empathy between you and your teachers. Breasts, contrary to popular belief, are not always sexy.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
S01 E02 - The Big Dance
We start with a shot of the Degrassi Digest – the actual one, the school newsletter, and not this blog, because that would just be weird. I'm briefly confused by how ugly it is, because nothing today is this crappily designed, until I remember that it's 1987, Word has only existed for a couple of years, and using a computer to put together a school newsletter is a ludicrous indulgence available only to the five richest kings of Europe.
We pan out to see that the newsletter is being perused by Joseph Stalin, very much alive and apparently hiding out in Canada, waiting until the time is right for a Communist resurgence. While he waits, he's started a family: Voula is in the corner, wearing a hideous apron and doing some kind of kitcheny housework, because ethnic families are old-fashioned. Write that down. She explains to him that she's the editor of the newsletter, and he says he's proud of her (a foothold in the media will help him to spread the revolutionary gospel later on). His Eastern European accent is almost as subtle and understated as Chico Marx's Italian accent.
But his pride is short-lived. He flips past the editorial page (entitled "The voice of Voula!") to find an ad for a dance this Saturday, offering "Fun!" and "Music!". It's worrying that the dance organisers didn't think that fun and music were standard, indispensable components of a dance, and actually felt a need to specify that they were planning on sourcing some fun and music for this dance specifically, and then emphasise this fact with exclamation marks. Unfortunately, Papa Stalin doesn't approve of fun or music. "Vat's thees, a dance? You're too young to go to dance!" he declares. "I don't vant my little girl dancing with boy who got only one thing on mind." "Papa, please!" wails Voula. His response: "Life is like a flower. Let it unfold." That is such a non-answer.
So, ethnic dads, they are old-fashioned. Everybody got that? Good, on to the opening credits.
After the credits, we're back at school. We see a poster declaring that "Only a broomhead would miss this dance!" Oh dear lord, it's one thing to use the word in speech, but committing it to paper is extra hopeless. A bunch of kids walk past, tunelessly tooting on assorted brass instruments, and it reminds me of the random brass bands, naval platoons, and crowds of models who used to wander unremarked around the Great Northern Hotel on Twin Peaks. Maybe David Lynch is secretly a Degrassi fan?
Lucy's talking to the twins, who by the way are now in Grade 8 and called Heather and Erica. Continuity be damned! They're coming over to her place before the dance. "Will your parents mind?" asks a twin (I'll be honest, I can't tell the difference unless they're both saying something very in-character and one of them then addresses the other by name). "No!" says Lucy. "They're loose." This is pretty much Lucy's catchphrase, and is actually a cover-up for the fact that they're neglectful deadbeats, but more on that in a couple of episodes.
Lucy heads off to the toilet, and Voula comes up to the twins. They ask her if she's going to the dance, but before she has to admit to being ethnic, Steph appears and tries to say hello. Voula wildly overreacts, with a blisteringly sarcastic "Oh, the school president is talking to me!!!" Steph looks embarrassed; the twins look like they're trying not to laugh. "Can't we ever be friends?" asks Steph. "Not in a hundred million years!" says Voula, and flounces off. Steph yells that she's being immature, and I can't argue.
Steph goes into the bathroom to change into her hideous skankwear (the fishing net again, draped over what looks like a mutilated polo shirt, and a green suede miniskirt). Lucy comes out of a cubicle (where she was reading the newspaper… nice) and asks her why she doesn't just dress like a hooker at home. Steph, unfastening the tablecloth she was wearing as a skirt, explains that her mom would ground her. "What a hick town," mutters Lucy. "All the parents are like fascists." Well, some kind of totalitarian regime of the mid-20th century, anyway.
Steph, for some reason, doesn't mind being called a hick, and is just amazed that Lucy's parents let her go around "like that". Lucy, for the record, is wearing a huge pink sweatshirt, a below-the-knee gypsy skirt over white leggings, some star earrings I'm kind of envying, a big bandana/scarf thing around her neck, and another one tied around her head. I mean, the sweatshirt is very outmoded now, and two scarves is a bit odd, but no parent aside from Richard Spier could object to this outfit. Your grandmother probably wishes you dressed like this. I have no idea why Steph thinks Lucy's folks would have a problem with it. "I can do whatever I like," says Lucy. "I can go where I want, dress how I want – " and at this point she apparently forgets how that line was supposed to end, because she just turns and leaves the room.
Steph is understandably thrown for a second, but apparently the show's budget won't cover another take, so she just soldiers on with the scene and calls Lucy back. "Have you ever asked a boy out?" "Sure!" says Lucy. "Lots of times!" "And they don't laugh?" "Of course not. Please, Stephanie, this is the '80s!" says Lucy, finally escaping from the bathroom. Heartened by this, Steph starts applying the six pounds of blusher that was de rigeur for the empowered girl of the '80s.
Out in the corridor, Michelle is apparently wearing a pyjama top; Spike is wearing what looks like a home-made Smiths T-shirt, which is a cute touch. Joey appears and goes over to Wheels. Remember Joey's best friend, Hank, from last episode? Hank is gone. You will never see Hank again. Try to forget Hank. Joey has actually just come over to brag to Wheels that he's going to the dance with Steph. "She lusts for my body!" he claims, on little to no evidence; even as he speaks, Steph is turning the terrifying power of her Flirting Grin on Wheels. Joey doesn't even notice that Wheels is smiling back at Steph, over Joey's shoulder. This isn't going to end well.
The girls go into the classroom. "He's SEW sexy!" says Steph. "What, Wheels?" asks one twin. "Well, he is better than some of the others," groans the other twin. "That's not saying much," the first twin admits, which I think is kind of rude considering that Snake and Shane are right behind them, about to sit down at their desks. Snake is wearing knee-length bright yellow shorts and a yellow shirt; his fashion choices are unusually car-crashy for a guy.
Steph, by the way, is wearing the most bizarre piece of jewellery: it resembles a bolo tie, only with fake pearls instead of a string, and ending a couple of inches below the… fasteny bit. Look, I'm sorry if my knowledge of bolo-tie terminology is deficient, ok?
OMG! Snake and Shane have super-powers! There's certainly no other explanation for how they are now suddenly back outside the classroom, walking towards it again. I mean, sure the scene might just have been lazily stage-managed, with nobody bothering to check basic issues of continuity, but… nah. Teleportation it is. Oh, also there's some kind of dialogue going on between Joey and Wheels in the foreground? Joey admits that he hasn't actually asked Steph to the dance yet, but he definitely will. Wheels looks perturbed.
Joey comes into the classroom and attempts a bit of flirting with Steph. She and the twins listen with not-at-all-concealed scorn; but if the best he can come up with is "When Jeremiah hits the floor, they always ask for more", I don't know what he was expecting. Mid-flirt, Wheels comes in and sits down at his desk. Steph ogles him like an ogly thing.
In comes Ms Avery, wearing some new Native American beadwork. Still left-wing, huh? Hilariously, the class greets her in unison as "Miss Avery", meaning that her lecture from last episode has been completely ignored. Voula gets up to speak to the class. She explains that Degrassi Junior High is planning to sponsor a foster child (at which the kids cheer with completely unrealistic enthusiasm, except for Steph, who's ostentatiously ignoring Voula). Unfortunately, nobody's actually thought how they're supposed to raise money for the sponsorship (I would have thought this was kind of a basic consideration?) so she asks for ideas.
Lucy suggests charging a dollar's admission to the dance and giving the money to the foster child. Everyone's wildly excited by this for some reason; Steph and Wheels take advantage of the diversion and ogle each other. Lucy also suggests that Voula should present the cheque at the end of the night, but Voula flails and says Steph should do it, as the school president. Steph icily agrees. Fade out to the sound of Ms Avery telling the class that sponsoring a foster child is great and it's important to help people less fortunate blah blah blah LEFT-WING.
All very nice, but "sponsoring a foster child" doesn't make any damn sense. Sponsoring and fostering are different things! And they keep using this expression and it is really bugging me.
After school, Lucy and Voula are walking out together, and Lucy is going on about how Voula should present the cheque, "not a broomhead like Stephanie". Damn. Lucy is actually one of my favourite characters in this, but I respect her less for using that word. Voula bursts out, "I'm probably not going to go to the dance! I've got too much homework."
Lucy is utterly appalled and says that Voula has the rest of her life to do homework. If I thought I was going to have to do homework for the rest of my life, I would kill myself; homework does actually end when you leave education, you know. Voula eventually admits that Papa Stalin won't let her to go to the dance. "Voula," says Lucy with an air of great worldliness, "it's all how you bring up your parents. You've gotta educate them, or they'll walk all over you. My parents are real loose." Everybody drink!
"My parents are nice!" Voula protests. "Just kind of old-fashioned. They come from a really little village." Funny, I thought Moscow was pretty big, but I suppose Voula knows best. "Don't you want to go?" asks Lucy, who's now putting on lipstick. "I'd love to!" says Voula. "Well, even parents can be reasonable, if you give them a chance. Ask again!" says Lucy. Yes, because parents love nagging. Voula gathers up her courage and asks to borrow Lucy's lipstick. Lucy looks kind of baffled that Voula is so tentative about it, but shares it anyway. Aww, female bonding.
That night, back at the Stalin residence, Voula's doing the cooking. For some reason they're having nothing but slices of bread for dinner. "Papa?" she asks. "What is it?" asks Joe, who's going through paperwork while drinking a brimming glass of wine. Booze always makes doing the household accounts much more fun! "Nothing," Voula mumbles. "Must be big nothing," he answers, and I'm sure he's playing up the ethnic accent for that line. Also, I think his shirt is made of graph paper.
Unfortunately, when Voula brings over the bread, he notices the lipstick, and makes her take it off. Ethnic dads are old-fashioned. Seriously. "You're just a little girl," he says. "It takes a long time to grow up." Studies have shown there's no quicker way to alienate a teenager than with a line like that. "So vat vas it you vere going to ask?" Voula tells him that there's this "thing" at school on Saturday, to do with the foster child, and it's utterly non-dance-like – in fact, it's "just like school", and it's in the evening, "so we could be with our family and do our homework during the day" (nice one), and, in fact, it is a meeting. Yeeeees, a meeting. That'll do. Stalin says she can go, in a voice that suggests he stopped listening some time ago, but adds that she has to be home by 9.30. Gee, I wonder if that curfew will be important in some way later on?
Next morning, in the girls' bathroom. Steph is wearing maybe her worst top yet. It's not particularly revealing, just bizarre: imagine if you had a shirt that was white with a ridiculous print of cars and tropical trees on it, and it had a really high collar that you wore up, and then you cut off the sleeves completely, and also cut out most of the back, from nearly the bottom of your back up to the bottom of the collar, so that it resembled a halter-top with a shirt collar. That's what she's wearing. With a huge plastic necklace. Also, she's wearing a lot of blue eyeshadow and is assiduously back-combing her hair as she practices crappy chat-up lines in the mirror. To her horror, a flushing sound from behind reveals that there's actually someone in one of the cubicles, and we just glimpse Nancy in the mirror, giving her a nicely eloquent smirk as she comes out of the cubicle. Heh.
Meanwhile Joey and Wheels come into the building together. "This is the day I ask Stephanie to the dance. She'll remember this day for the rest of her life," Joey announces. Wheels gives him a patronising smile, but Joey isn't the kind of guy who notices these things. Steph pops up out of nowhere and comes over to the guys. Joey tries to motion Wheels away, but before he can go, Steph asks to talk to Wheels alone. Joey does a terrible job of hiding how annoyed he is, but goes off, muttering something about polishing his nails. Wow, Joey invented metrosexuality?
Steph frogmarches Wheels into a cupboard full of gym supplies for some reason, hits him with the full-scale Flirting Grin, and asks him to the dance. Wheels, brave man that he is, doesn't run screaming, not even a little bit, and in fact agrees to go with her. Joey overhears and runs off. Awww. When Wheels is gone, Steph does a victory squee. Her hair is so wide, she looks like a badly dressed mushroom.
Saturday night. Steph is rehearsing her speech for the dance and bundling some kind of silver outfit into her bag. Voula comes downstairs in a fugly purple skirt and a hideous ethnic/Victorian plaid blouse that we may or may not have seen before – it's hard to tell these… things… apart. Her dad is doing the dishes (!) and reminds her that if she doesn't get home by 9.30, he's going to the school to pick her up. They're sure emphasising this 9.30 thing, but I'm sure it won't be relevant. Wheels is in a tiny bathroom. He asks "Dad" if he can borrow some aftershave, and a disembodied voice mumbles "OK, sure." Unperturbed by the apparent hauntedness of his bathroom, Wheels pours out a handful of some bright blue stuff that looks more like mouthwash to me, and rubs it all over his face and neck.
Lucy's chilling on the couch, reading a huge book about "MOVIES". Voula knocks at the door, and Lucy goes to let her in. She's wearing leopard-print leggings and a bright orange top with a jagged hem which looks like something you might cobble together if you had to go to a fancy-dress party as Wilma Flintstone on short notice. When she sees Voula's "outfit", she chokes out a polite compliment, but obviously even Voula knows how bad her clothes are, because she quickly explains that she brought other stuff to change into. "I'm so excited!" she sighs. "My first dance." Her misplaced optimism about a junior-high dance is utterly adorable. Judging by the look on her face, Lucy feels the same way I do.
Another knock at the door, and it's the twins, plus Steph. The twins remark on how posh the house is, but Lucy retorts, "This dump? You should have seen our loft in Manhattan." This is a breathtakingly rude response, but the others don't seem to notice. Steph's heading towards the stairs when Voula comes down. She's wearing heels (!!), a not-completely-terrible skirt with random sparkly bits, and a peasant blouse that isn't as terrible as her usual peasant blouses, but is such a morbid shade of hospital-décor blue that it makes me want to cry.
She and Steph exchange awkward glares, and Voula announces she's leaving for the dance right now. Lucy and the twins tell her to save some boys for them. Given that Steph will be there in a Steph outfit, I think it's probably not Voula they need to worry about.
Outside the school, Voula's greeted by some extras. I don't get a proper look at their outfits but one of them is wearing a blouse made from that brown swirly carpet that old people have in their living rooms. Snake is sitting outside in sunglasses, apparently for ogling purposes.
Aaaargh. This dance looks so fucking depressing. There's hardly anyone there, the gym is way too brightly lit and full of random folding chairs and crates and things, and there's a huge banner reading "DEGRASSI'S BENEFIT DANCE TO SUPPORT A FOSTER CHILD !!", which I think is the least catchy name for a social event in human history. Wheels is wandering around aimlessly in a pair of obscenely tight pants, there's a kid in the background wearing what I swear is a man's nightshirt over white tapered trousers, and Ms Avery is wearing the kind of horrible floral dress that your mother might have worn to the wedding of a distant relative in 1985, if your mother was a particularly bad dresser and didn't like the relative or approve of the marriage.
Voula doesn't know any better, though, and she wanders into the gym looking utterly spellbound and mumbling, "Wow! Fantastic…" rather loudly to herself, until she's called over to a table by a very miserable-looking Caitlin. I would blame her misery on the dance, but Caitlin's always miserable about something. Meanwhile, Arthur is dancing with Nightshirt Kid. Mr Raditch makes a deeply cringeworthy speech, in which he refers to himself as "your disc jockey, Rompin' Rockin' Raditch", and claims that he'll be playing "the kind of music YOU wanna hear". If any teacher at my school had made that speech, he would have been lucky to escape physical violence, but apparently Canadian kids are way more willing to humour this kind of behaviour, because they just laugh politely.
Back at Lucy's house, the girls are having a generic teen whinge about how their parents treat them like kids, when one twin notices the huge amount of booze on the kitchen counter. "If you want to drink, go ahead," says Lucy. "But what about your parents?" asks the other twin. "Oh, they're loose," she says. Drink! And apparently the twins are playing the Lucy's Parents Drinking Game too, because this is the signal for them to start boozing.
Just then, Steph comes down the stairs, in a pair of bright pink leggings, and you know the way leggings have to be worn with a long top, otherwise they just look kind of obscene? Well, she's not wearing a long top. (A blue boob tube and a shirt made out of one of those foil blankets they give you for shock, since you asked.) And it looks kind of obscene.
She's amazed to find the twins drinking, but when they act surprised that she's never been drunk, she insists that she has in fact been drunk lots of times, and starts swigging whiskey from a bottle. Lucy looks appropriately concerned when she realises that her friends obviously have no idea what they're doing, but she's not the meddling type.
Meanwhile, at the dance, Joey turns up in a Hawaiian shirt, sunglasses, and a straw sunhat – seriously, have none of these kids ever even seen a disco on TV? Nightshirts and sunhats! Joey comes up to Wheels and theatrically smells him, claiming his aftershave smells like oven cleaner, but Wheels just smirks at him, and then foolishly lets slip that he doesn't know where Stephanie is. Joey is delighted at this, and goes over to mess with Mr Raditch's stack of records. Mr Raditch literally slaps his hand away. Ha!
At Lucy's, the girls are laughing idiotically and drinking from assorted bottles, while Lucy watches from the couch. Suddenly her mom phones. Lucy calls her mom by her first name! How daring and liberal and, dare I say, loose! She then hangs up, just in time to watch Steph downing an entire glass full of Bailey's, a sight which makes me feel vaguely queasy. Not as queasy as it will shortly make Steph, though.
Aw, how cute! Arthur's asking Voula to dance! Well, actually what they do is stand several feet apart, grin nervously at each other, and sway arrhythmically from side to side, but I suppose that's as close as two such hopeless geeks will ever get to actual dancing. A briefly non-miserable Caitlin is dancing with Joey, straw sunhat and all. Wheels is sulking at a table.
Outside, the girls are stumbling drunkenly towards the school, bellowing the school song. Steph falls over at one point. Alexa is sulking outside the door in a power suit for some reason, and Spike and Shane are having what looks like a Deep Talk in the hallway. I've seen real grown-up TV shows, made on actual budgets, that could learn a few things about foreshadowing from this show.
Finally, the girls make it into the gym, and Steph sleazes over to Wheels. Her greeting is a classic: "Oh Wheeeels, you're SO SEXY! …Are you wearing mosquito repellent?" Meanwhile Lucy explains to Voula that Steph's "been drinking", conveniently neglecting to mention that she's the one who supplied her with unlimited hard liquor.
Mr Raditch announces something called the "Annual Degrassi Junior High Crazy Dance". Cue some obstinately sane jumping up and down from the kids. It turns out that jumping wildly while spinning your head around really fast is sort of a bad idea when you're incredibly drunk, because Steph suddenly stops and runs off, with her hand to her mouth. The girls follow her into the bathroom, just in time to hear some deeply unpleasant vomiting noises from one of the cubicles.
Back in the gym, Wheels resignedly goes back to his Sulkin' Table.
Steph is done throwing up and is now washing her face. She looks at herself in the mirror (she's even more terrifying than usual, due to the goth-style smudged mascara) and mumbles that she'll never be able to face Wheels again. A twin unhelpfully points out that she'd "better get better real quick" because she has to present this confusing foster-sponsorship cheque. People always get better when you tell them to get better. But strangely, the only effect it has on Steph is to make her sit down on the floor in a pool of self-pity and whine, "Somebody else has to do it! …Somebody? Please?" The twins look at her in a half-heartedly pitying way that makes it very clear they have no intention of helping. Worse still, Lucy suddenly decides she hasn't facilitated enough trouble tonight, and runs off to get Voula.
Just now, Voula's in the midst of some passionate slow-dancing with Arthur. Unfortunately, it's time for her to leave, or her clothes will magically turn back into plaid monstrosities. And thus ends the only action either of these two will ever get. Anyway, she's grabbed on her way out by Lucy, who ignores her protests and drags her off to the toilets.
Dun-dun-dun! Papa Stalin is pulling up outside.
Steph is still on the bathroom floor, looking angsty, when Voula and Lucy come in. Voula is making a snide remark about how Stephanie is "good at making speeches", but Lucy just points at Steph and says, "But look. She's so sick." The word is drunk, Lucy. D-R-U-N-K. Drunkety drunk drunk drunk.
Ethnic Dad gets out of his car and goes into the school building. Shane and Spike are now sitting on the steps, and he's got his arm around her. Stalin shoots them a dirty look; for once, his distrust of lecherous North American youth is not misplaced. Inside the gym, he sees more horrors. There are kids slow-dancing! To some pretty awful music! And a disco ball! Those things are an invitation to sin. Ms Avery goes up onto the stage with a hairy charity guy in a tweed suit, and asks for a big round of applause for Stephanie. Lucy runs up and gives her some kind of cover story, and Ms Avery, apparently used to last-minute drunken emergencies of this kind, cheerfully announces Voula instead. Nobody seems to have noticed Stalin, who's lurking at the back of the hall. We can only see the back of his head, but it looks pissed.
Voula makes a very sweet speech about how she and her classmates raised money for charity to show that kids aren't selfish, and are aware of the problems of the wider world, etc. Now, in any normal TV show, this is where they'd cut to Voula's dad, his icy stony heart melting out of its icy stony ways when he sees that his daughter is a good kid really, and only disobeyed him for a good cause, and we'd be all set for a heartwarming reconciliation. But this is Degrassi Junior High, and he's an Ethnic Dad, and he's just stomping steadily towards the podium with a Face o'Doom that makes me want to yelp in terror and hide behind the couch. Impressively, Voula manages to hold it together long enough to finish her speech, at which point he grabs her arm and drags her out of the room. Classy guy.
Back in the bathroom, Stephanie's alone and barefoot on the floor in the dark, the sound of a dripping tap adding some extra squalor to the scene, like it wasn't squalid enough already.
Voula and her dad are arguing out in the hall. Voula claims that "everyone else in the whole world gets to go to dances", which suggests she maybe isn't so up on the Third World as her speech would have us believe.
Lucy comes in to check on Steph, who's really milking this. Lucy offers to let Steph come home with her to get changed into her normal clothes, and I can't decide if she's being way nicer than Steph deserves or is just desperate for company because her parents are deadbeats.
Out in the hall, Stalin is yelling, "Your mama didn't go to dance till she vas sixteen!" Voula sensibly points out that it's no longer the 1890s and they are no longer living in Generic Eastern European Country, but Ethnic Dads have no time for Canadian logic. Even when she points out that the dance was for a good cause, he answers, "You lied, Voula. That cannot change!" Ah, ethnic dads. Old-fashioned to the last.
"I feel like such a broomhead," moans Stephanie, who's apparently progressed to the "eerily lucid self-awareness" stage of drunkenness. Lucy helps her out of the bathroom and down the hall, while Stephanie rambles about phoning everyone to apologise for her actions (wow, she's skipped straight to the "joining a 12-step programme" stage) and getting her mother to make her cocoa. Which I think will only make her more sick, but I don't really care as long as we don't have to hear her vomit again.
The girls walk away, and we're left with an unutterably bleak shot of the hallway in semi-darkness, a banner for the dance on the wall and deflating balloons discarded on the floor. It's a heartbreaking visual metaphor for all the shattered girlish hopes and dreams of what this dance would be, and, by extension, for everything tragic and disappointing in this world.
They really could have picked a better image to freeze on for the end credits.
Dubious lesson of the week: Ethnic families are old-fashioned, and the fathers are brutal autocrats with hearts of stone, fists of iron, and moustaches of pure hate. If you lie to your parents for a good cause, don't think that'll change anything: they'll still be mad at you when they find out. Also, if you get unspeakably drunk before you have to give a speech, you'll probably spend the evening vomiting – but there'll be some minion you can guilt-trip into covering for you, so try not to worry too much.
We pan out to see that the newsletter is being perused by Joseph Stalin, very much alive and apparently hiding out in Canada, waiting until the time is right for a Communist resurgence. While he waits, he's started a family: Voula is in the corner, wearing a hideous apron and doing some kind of kitcheny housework, because ethnic families are old-fashioned. Write that down. She explains to him that she's the editor of the newsletter, and he says he's proud of her (a foothold in the media will help him to spread the revolutionary gospel later on). His Eastern European accent is almost as subtle and understated as Chico Marx's Italian accent.
But his pride is short-lived. He flips past the editorial page (entitled "The voice of Voula!") to find an ad for a dance this Saturday, offering "Fun!" and "Music!". It's worrying that the dance organisers didn't think that fun and music were standard, indispensable components of a dance, and actually felt a need to specify that they were planning on sourcing some fun and music for this dance specifically, and then emphasise this fact with exclamation marks. Unfortunately, Papa Stalin doesn't approve of fun or music. "Vat's thees, a dance? You're too young to go to dance!" he declares. "I don't vant my little girl dancing with boy who got only one thing on mind." "Papa, please!" wails Voula. His response: "Life is like a flower. Let it unfold." That is such a non-answer.
So, ethnic dads, they are old-fashioned. Everybody got that? Good, on to the opening credits.
After the credits, we're back at school. We see a poster declaring that "Only a broomhead would miss this dance!" Oh dear lord, it's one thing to use the word in speech, but committing it to paper is extra hopeless. A bunch of kids walk past, tunelessly tooting on assorted brass instruments, and it reminds me of the random brass bands, naval platoons, and crowds of models who used to wander unremarked around the Great Northern Hotel on Twin Peaks. Maybe David Lynch is secretly a Degrassi fan?
Lucy's talking to the twins, who by the way are now in Grade 8 and called Heather and Erica. Continuity be damned! They're coming over to her place before the dance. "Will your parents mind?" asks a twin (I'll be honest, I can't tell the difference unless they're both saying something very in-character and one of them then addresses the other by name). "No!" says Lucy. "They're loose." This is pretty much Lucy's catchphrase, and is actually a cover-up for the fact that they're neglectful deadbeats, but more on that in a couple of episodes.
Lucy heads off to the toilet, and Voula comes up to the twins. They ask her if she's going to the dance, but before she has to admit to being ethnic, Steph appears and tries to say hello. Voula wildly overreacts, with a blisteringly sarcastic "Oh, the school president is talking to me!!!" Steph looks embarrassed; the twins look like they're trying not to laugh. "Can't we ever be friends?" asks Steph. "Not in a hundred million years!" says Voula, and flounces off. Steph yells that she's being immature, and I can't argue.
Steph goes into the bathroom to change into her hideous skankwear (the fishing net again, draped over what looks like a mutilated polo shirt, and a green suede miniskirt). Lucy comes out of a cubicle (where she was reading the newspaper… nice) and asks her why she doesn't just dress like a hooker at home. Steph, unfastening the tablecloth she was wearing as a skirt, explains that her mom would ground her. "What a hick town," mutters Lucy. "All the parents are like fascists." Well, some kind of totalitarian regime of the mid-20th century, anyway.
Steph, for some reason, doesn't mind being called a hick, and is just amazed that Lucy's parents let her go around "like that". Lucy, for the record, is wearing a huge pink sweatshirt, a below-the-knee gypsy skirt over white leggings, some star earrings I'm kind of envying, a big bandana/scarf thing around her neck, and another one tied around her head. I mean, the sweatshirt is very outmoded now, and two scarves is a bit odd, but no parent aside from Richard Spier could object to this outfit. Your grandmother probably wishes you dressed like this. I have no idea why Steph thinks Lucy's folks would have a problem with it. "I can do whatever I like," says Lucy. "I can go where I want, dress how I want – " and at this point she apparently forgets how that line was supposed to end, because she just turns and leaves the room.
Steph is understandably thrown for a second, but apparently the show's budget won't cover another take, so she just soldiers on with the scene and calls Lucy back. "Have you ever asked a boy out?" "Sure!" says Lucy. "Lots of times!" "And they don't laugh?" "Of course not. Please, Stephanie, this is the '80s!" says Lucy, finally escaping from the bathroom. Heartened by this, Steph starts applying the six pounds of blusher that was de rigeur for the empowered girl of the '80s.
Out in the corridor, Michelle is apparently wearing a pyjama top; Spike is wearing what looks like a home-made Smiths T-shirt, which is a cute touch. Joey appears and goes over to Wheels. Remember Joey's best friend, Hank, from last episode? Hank is gone. You will never see Hank again. Try to forget Hank. Joey has actually just come over to brag to Wheels that he's going to the dance with Steph. "She lusts for my body!" he claims, on little to no evidence; even as he speaks, Steph is turning the terrifying power of her Flirting Grin on Wheels. Joey doesn't even notice that Wheels is smiling back at Steph, over Joey's shoulder. This isn't going to end well.
The girls go into the classroom. "He's SEW sexy!" says Steph. "What, Wheels?" asks one twin. "Well, he is better than some of the others," groans the other twin. "That's not saying much," the first twin admits, which I think is kind of rude considering that Snake and Shane are right behind them, about to sit down at their desks. Snake is wearing knee-length bright yellow shorts and a yellow shirt; his fashion choices are unusually car-crashy for a guy.
Steph, by the way, is wearing the most bizarre piece of jewellery: it resembles a bolo tie, only with fake pearls instead of a string, and ending a couple of inches below the… fasteny bit. Look, I'm sorry if my knowledge of bolo-tie terminology is deficient, ok?
OMG! Snake and Shane have super-powers! There's certainly no other explanation for how they are now suddenly back outside the classroom, walking towards it again. I mean, sure the scene might just have been lazily stage-managed, with nobody bothering to check basic issues of continuity, but… nah. Teleportation it is. Oh, also there's some kind of dialogue going on between Joey and Wheels in the foreground? Joey admits that he hasn't actually asked Steph to the dance yet, but he definitely will. Wheels looks perturbed.
Joey comes into the classroom and attempts a bit of flirting with Steph. She and the twins listen with not-at-all-concealed scorn; but if the best he can come up with is "When Jeremiah hits the floor, they always ask for more", I don't know what he was expecting. Mid-flirt, Wheels comes in and sits down at his desk. Steph ogles him like an ogly thing.
In comes Ms Avery, wearing some new Native American beadwork. Still left-wing, huh? Hilariously, the class greets her in unison as "Miss Avery", meaning that her lecture from last episode has been completely ignored. Voula gets up to speak to the class. She explains that Degrassi Junior High is planning to sponsor a foster child (at which the kids cheer with completely unrealistic enthusiasm, except for Steph, who's ostentatiously ignoring Voula). Unfortunately, nobody's actually thought how they're supposed to raise money for the sponsorship (I would have thought this was kind of a basic consideration?) so she asks for ideas.
Lucy suggests charging a dollar's admission to the dance and giving the money to the foster child. Everyone's wildly excited by this for some reason; Steph and Wheels take advantage of the diversion and ogle each other. Lucy also suggests that Voula should present the cheque at the end of the night, but Voula flails and says Steph should do it, as the school president. Steph icily agrees. Fade out to the sound of Ms Avery telling the class that sponsoring a foster child is great and it's important to help people less fortunate blah blah blah LEFT-WING.
All very nice, but "sponsoring a foster child" doesn't make any damn sense. Sponsoring and fostering are different things! And they keep using this expression and it is really bugging me.
After school, Lucy and Voula are walking out together, and Lucy is going on about how Voula should present the cheque, "not a broomhead like Stephanie". Damn. Lucy is actually one of my favourite characters in this, but I respect her less for using that word. Voula bursts out, "I'm probably not going to go to the dance! I've got too much homework."
Lucy is utterly appalled and says that Voula has the rest of her life to do homework. If I thought I was going to have to do homework for the rest of my life, I would kill myself; homework does actually end when you leave education, you know. Voula eventually admits that Papa Stalin won't let her to go to the dance. "Voula," says Lucy with an air of great worldliness, "it's all how you bring up your parents. You've gotta educate them, or they'll walk all over you. My parents are real loose." Everybody drink!
"My parents are nice!" Voula protests. "Just kind of old-fashioned. They come from a really little village." Funny, I thought Moscow was pretty big, but I suppose Voula knows best. "Don't you want to go?" asks Lucy, who's now putting on lipstick. "I'd love to!" says Voula. "Well, even parents can be reasonable, if you give them a chance. Ask again!" says Lucy. Yes, because parents love nagging. Voula gathers up her courage and asks to borrow Lucy's lipstick. Lucy looks kind of baffled that Voula is so tentative about it, but shares it anyway. Aww, female bonding.
That night, back at the Stalin residence, Voula's doing the cooking. For some reason they're having nothing but slices of bread for dinner. "Papa?" she asks. "What is it?" asks Joe, who's going through paperwork while drinking a brimming glass of wine. Booze always makes doing the household accounts much more fun! "Nothing," Voula mumbles. "Must be big nothing," he answers, and I'm sure he's playing up the ethnic accent for that line. Also, I think his shirt is made of graph paper.
Unfortunately, when Voula brings over the bread, he notices the lipstick, and makes her take it off. Ethnic dads are old-fashioned. Seriously. "You're just a little girl," he says. "It takes a long time to grow up." Studies have shown there's no quicker way to alienate a teenager than with a line like that. "So vat vas it you vere going to ask?" Voula tells him that there's this "thing" at school on Saturday, to do with the foster child, and it's utterly non-dance-like – in fact, it's "just like school", and it's in the evening, "so we could be with our family and do our homework during the day" (nice one), and, in fact, it is a meeting. Yeeeees, a meeting. That'll do. Stalin says she can go, in a voice that suggests he stopped listening some time ago, but adds that she has to be home by 9.30. Gee, I wonder if that curfew will be important in some way later on?
Next morning, in the girls' bathroom. Steph is wearing maybe her worst top yet. It's not particularly revealing, just bizarre: imagine if you had a shirt that was white with a ridiculous print of cars and tropical trees on it, and it had a really high collar that you wore up, and then you cut off the sleeves completely, and also cut out most of the back, from nearly the bottom of your back up to the bottom of the collar, so that it resembled a halter-top with a shirt collar. That's what she's wearing. With a huge plastic necklace. Also, she's wearing a lot of blue eyeshadow and is assiduously back-combing her hair as she practices crappy chat-up lines in the mirror. To her horror, a flushing sound from behind reveals that there's actually someone in one of the cubicles, and we just glimpse Nancy in the mirror, giving her a nicely eloquent smirk as she comes out of the cubicle. Heh.
Meanwhile Joey and Wheels come into the building together. "This is the day I ask Stephanie to the dance. She'll remember this day for the rest of her life," Joey announces. Wheels gives him a patronising smile, but Joey isn't the kind of guy who notices these things. Steph pops up out of nowhere and comes over to the guys. Joey tries to motion Wheels away, but before he can go, Steph asks to talk to Wheels alone. Joey does a terrible job of hiding how annoyed he is, but goes off, muttering something about polishing his nails. Wow, Joey invented metrosexuality?
Steph frogmarches Wheels into a cupboard full of gym supplies for some reason, hits him with the full-scale Flirting Grin, and asks him to the dance. Wheels, brave man that he is, doesn't run screaming, not even a little bit, and in fact agrees to go with her. Joey overhears and runs off. Awww. When Wheels is gone, Steph does a victory squee. Her hair is so wide, she looks like a badly dressed mushroom.
Saturday night. Steph is rehearsing her speech for the dance and bundling some kind of silver outfit into her bag. Voula comes downstairs in a fugly purple skirt and a hideous ethnic/Victorian plaid blouse that we may or may not have seen before – it's hard to tell these… things… apart. Her dad is doing the dishes (!) and reminds her that if she doesn't get home by 9.30, he's going to the school to pick her up. They're sure emphasising this 9.30 thing, but I'm sure it won't be relevant. Wheels is in a tiny bathroom. He asks "Dad" if he can borrow some aftershave, and a disembodied voice mumbles "OK, sure." Unperturbed by the apparent hauntedness of his bathroom, Wheels pours out a handful of some bright blue stuff that looks more like mouthwash to me, and rubs it all over his face and neck.
Lucy's chilling on the couch, reading a huge book about "MOVIES". Voula knocks at the door, and Lucy goes to let her in. She's wearing leopard-print leggings and a bright orange top with a jagged hem which looks like something you might cobble together if you had to go to a fancy-dress party as Wilma Flintstone on short notice. When she sees Voula's "outfit", she chokes out a polite compliment, but obviously even Voula knows how bad her clothes are, because she quickly explains that she brought other stuff to change into. "I'm so excited!" she sighs. "My first dance." Her misplaced optimism about a junior-high dance is utterly adorable. Judging by the look on her face, Lucy feels the same way I do.
Another knock at the door, and it's the twins, plus Steph. The twins remark on how posh the house is, but Lucy retorts, "This dump? You should have seen our loft in Manhattan." This is a breathtakingly rude response, but the others don't seem to notice. Steph's heading towards the stairs when Voula comes down. She's wearing heels (!!), a not-completely-terrible skirt with random sparkly bits, and a peasant blouse that isn't as terrible as her usual peasant blouses, but is such a morbid shade of hospital-décor blue that it makes me want to cry.
She and Steph exchange awkward glares, and Voula announces she's leaving for the dance right now. Lucy and the twins tell her to save some boys for them. Given that Steph will be there in a Steph outfit, I think it's probably not Voula they need to worry about.
Outside the school, Voula's greeted by some extras. I don't get a proper look at their outfits but one of them is wearing a blouse made from that brown swirly carpet that old people have in their living rooms. Snake is sitting outside in sunglasses, apparently for ogling purposes.
Aaaargh. This dance looks so fucking depressing. There's hardly anyone there, the gym is way too brightly lit and full of random folding chairs and crates and things, and there's a huge banner reading "DEGRASSI'S BENEFIT DANCE TO SUPPORT A FOSTER CHILD !!", which I think is the least catchy name for a social event in human history. Wheels is wandering around aimlessly in a pair of obscenely tight pants, there's a kid in the background wearing what I swear is a man's nightshirt over white tapered trousers, and Ms Avery is wearing the kind of horrible floral dress that your mother might have worn to the wedding of a distant relative in 1985, if your mother was a particularly bad dresser and didn't like the relative or approve of the marriage.
Voula doesn't know any better, though, and she wanders into the gym looking utterly spellbound and mumbling, "Wow! Fantastic…" rather loudly to herself, until she's called over to a table by a very miserable-looking Caitlin. I would blame her misery on the dance, but Caitlin's always miserable about something. Meanwhile, Arthur is dancing with Nightshirt Kid. Mr Raditch makes a deeply cringeworthy speech, in which he refers to himself as "your disc jockey, Rompin' Rockin' Raditch", and claims that he'll be playing "the kind of music YOU wanna hear". If any teacher at my school had made that speech, he would have been lucky to escape physical violence, but apparently Canadian kids are way more willing to humour this kind of behaviour, because they just laugh politely.
Back at Lucy's house, the girls are having a generic teen whinge about how their parents treat them like kids, when one twin notices the huge amount of booze on the kitchen counter. "If you want to drink, go ahead," says Lucy. "But what about your parents?" asks the other twin. "Oh, they're loose," she says. Drink! And apparently the twins are playing the Lucy's Parents Drinking Game too, because this is the signal for them to start boozing.
Just then, Steph comes down the stairs, in a pair of bright pink leggings, and you know the way leggings have to be worn with a long top, otherwise they just look kind of obscene? Well, she's not wearing a long top. (A blue boob tube and a shirt made out of one of those foil blankets they give you for shock, since you asked.) And it looks kind of obscene.
She's amazed to find the twins drinking, but when they act surprised that she's never been drunk, she insists that she has in fact been drunk lots of times, and starts swigging whiskey from a bottle. Lucy looks appropriately concerned when she realises that her friends obviously have no idea what they're doing, but she's not the meddling type.
Meanwhile, at the dance, Joey turns up in a Hawaiian shirt, sunglasses, and a straw sunhat – seriously, have none of these kids ever even seen a disco on TV? Nightshirts and sunhats! Joey comes up to Wheels and theatrically smells him, claiming his aftershave smells like oven cleaner, but Wheels just smirks at him, and then foolishly lets slip that he doesn't know where Stephanie is. Joey is delighted at this, and goes over to mess with Mr Raditch's stack of records. Mr Raditch literally slaps his hand away. Ha!
At Lucy's, the girls are laughing idiotically and drinking from assorted bottles, while Lucy watches from the couch. Suddenly her mom phones. Lucy calls her mom by her first name! How daring and liberal and, dare I say, loose! She then hangs up, just in time to watch Steph downing an entire glass full of Bailey's, a sight which makes me feel vaguely queasy. Not as queasy as it will shortly make Steph, though.
Aw, how cute! Arthur's asking Voula to dance! Well, actually what they do is stand several feet apart, grin nervously at each other, and sway arrhythmically from side to side, but I suppose that's as close as two such hopeless geeks will ever get to actual dancing. A briefly non-miserable Caitlin is dancing with Joey, straw sunhat and all. Wheels is sulking at a table.
Outside, the girls are stumbling drunkenly towards the school, bellowing the school song. Steph falls over at one point. Alexa is sulking outside the door in a power suit for some reason, and Spike and Shane are having what looks like a Deep Talk in the hallway. I've seen real grown-up TV shows, made on actual budgets, that could learn a few things about foreshadowing from this show.
Finally, the girls make it into the gym, and Steph sleazes over to Wheels. Her greeting is a classic: "Oh Wheeeels, you're SO SEXY! …Are you wearing mosquito repellent?" Meanwhile Lucy explains to Voula that Steph's "been drinking", conveniently neglecting to mention that she's the one who supplied her with unlimited hard liquor.
Mr Raditch announces something called the "Annual Degrassi Junior High Crazy Dance". Cue some obstinately sane jumping up and down from the kids. It turns out that jumping wildly while spinning your head around really fast is sort of a bad idea when you're incredibly drunk, because Steph suddenly stops and runs off, with her hand to her mouth. The girls follow her into the bathroom, just in time to hear some deeply unpleasant vomiting noises from one of the cubicles.
Back in the gym, Wheels resignedly goes back to his Sulkin' Table.
Steph is done throwing up and is now washing her face. She looks at herself in the mirror (she's even more terrifying than usual, due to the goth-style smudged mascara) and mumbles that she'll never be able to face Wheels again. A twin unhelpfully points out that she'd "better get better real quick" because she has to present this confusing foster-sponsorship cheque. People always get better when you tell them to get better. But strangely, the only effect it has on Steph is to make her sit down on the floor in a pool of self-pity and whine, "Somebody else has to do it! …Somebody? Please?" The twins look at her in a half-heartedly pitying way that makes it very clear they have no intention of helping. Worse still, Lucy suddenly decides she hasn't facilitated enough trouble tonight, and runs off to get Voula.
Just now, Voula's in the midst of some passionate slow-dancing with Arthur. Unfortunately, it's time for her to leave, or her clothes will magically turn back into plaid monstrosities. And thus ends the only action either of these two will ever get. Anyway, she's grabbed on her way out by Lucy, who ignores her protests and drags her off to the toilets.
Dun-dun-dun! Papa Stalin is pulling up outside.
Steph is still on the bathroom floor, looking angsty, when Voula and Lucy come in. Voula is making a snide remark about how Stephanie is "good at making speeches", but Lucy just points at Steph and says, "But look. She's so sick." The word is drunk, Lucy. D-R-U-N-K. Drunkety drunk drunk drunk.
Ethnic Dad gets out of his car and goes into the school building. Shane and Spike are now sitting on the steps, and he's got his arm around her. Stalin shoots them a dirty look; for once, his distrust of lecherous North American youth is not misplaced. Inside the gym, he sees more horrors. There are kids slow-dancing! To some pretty awful music! And a disco ball! Those things are an invitation to sin. Ms Avery goes up onto the stage with a hairy charity guy in a tweed suit, and asks for a big round of applause for Stephanie. Lucy runs up and gives her some kind of cover story, and Ms Avery, apparently used to last-minute drunken emergencies of this kind, cheerfully announces Voula instead. Nobody seems to have noticed Stalin, who's lurking at the back of the hall. We can only see the back of his head, but it looks pissed.
Voula makes a very sweet speech about how she and her classmates raised money for charity to show that kids aren't selfish, and are aware of the problems of the wider world, etc. Now, in any normal TV show, this is where they'd cut to Voula's dad, his icy stony heart melting out of its icy stony ways when he sees that his daughter is a good kid really, and only disobeyed him for a good cause, and we'd be all set for a heartwarming reconciliation. But this is Degrassi Junior High, and he's an Ethnic Dad, and he's just stomping steadily towards the podium with a Face o'Doom that makes me want to yelp in terror and hide behind the couch. Impressively, Voula manages to hold it together long enough to finish her speech, at which point he grabs her arm and drags her out of the room. Classy guy.
Back in the bathroom, Stephanie's alone and barefoot on the floor in the dark, the sound of a dripping tap adding some extra squalor to the scene, like it wasn't squalid enough already.
Voula and her dad are arguing out in the hall. Voula claims that "everyone else in the whole world gets to go to dances", which suggests she maybe isn't so up on the Third World as her speech would have us believe.
Lucy comes in to check on Steph, who's really milking this. Lucy offers to let Steph come home with her to get changed into her normal clothes, and I can't decide if she's being way nicer than Steph deserves or is just desperate for company because her parents are deadbeats.
Out in the hall, Stalin is yelling, "Your mama didn't go to dance till she vas sixteen!" Voula sensibly points out that it's no longer the 1890s and they are no longer living in Generic Eastern European Country, but Ethnic Dads have no time for Canadian logic. Even when she points out that the dance was for a good cause, he answers, "You lied, Voula. That cannot change!" Ah, ethnic dads. Old-fashioned to the last.
"I feel like such a broomhead," moans Stephanie, who's apparently progressed to the "eerily lucid self-awareness" stage of drunkenness. Lucy helps her out of the bathroom and down the hall, while Stephanie rambles about phoning everyone to apologise for her actions (wow, she's skipped straight to the "joining a 12-step programme" stage) and getting her mother to make her cocoa. Which I think will only make her more sick, but I don't really care as long as we don't have to hear her vomit again.
The girls walk away, and we're left with an unutterably bleak shot of the hallway in semi-darkness, a banner for the dance on the wall and deflating balloons discarded on the floor. It's a heartbreaking visual metaphor for all the shattered girlish hopes and dreams of what this dance would be, and, by extension, for everything tragic and disappointing in this world.
They really could have picked a better image to freeze on for the end credits.
Dubious lesson of the week: Ethnic families are old-fashioned, and the fathers are brutal autocrats with hearts of stone, fists of iron, and moustaches of pure hate. If you lie to your parents for a good cause, don't think that'll change anything: they'll still be mad at you when they find out. Also, if you get unspeakably drunk before you have to give a speech, you'll probably spend the evening vomiting – but there'll be some minion you can guilt-trip into covering for you, so try not to worry too much.
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